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Intel has inadvertently revealed some new details regarding a future Xeon platform called Oak Stream. The CPUs for this platform will go by the name Diamond Rapids, and according to this new information, they will be plugged into an absolutely gargantuan socket. It seems Intel didn’t mean to publish this information just yet, as the page now resolves to a 404 error.
The source of this information is Intel itself, which posted an interposer on its design tools site for its upcoming server platform. The rogue interposer listing was discovered by Twitter user @harukaze5719, who thankfully took a screenshot. The now-deleted information described a $900 interposer designed for Oak Stream’s socket LGA 9324, so it has almost 10,000 contact points. Simple math tells us it’s nearly six times bigger than an LGA 1700 socket for client CPUs and more than twice as big as the current LGA 4677 for 4th and 5th generation Xeon chips.
This upcoming socket is also bigger than the LGA 7529 Birch Stream platform, home to its Sierra Forest 288-core E-core Xeon chips and 120-core Granite Rapids P-core Xeons. Techpowerup notes that the 2024 Xeons are made using the new Intel 3 node, whereas the follow-up to Sierra Forest will be called Clearwater Forest, built on the Intel 18A process. The now-revealed Diamond Rapids will come after that processor family, so it’s likely to utilize Intel 14A, making its arrival likely in 2026.
It will be some time before we hear more about Diamond Rapids, but it could be a whopper of a chip with greatly expanded core counts, up to 16 DRAM channels, and support for PCIe 6.0. It will be going toe-to-toe with AMD’s Zen 6 Epyc chips, which will be code-named Venice. It will surely be an epic battle as AMD looks to up the ante with greatly expanded core counts, I/O options, and ever-denser core configurations.