First Photos of Intel's 256-Core Xeon 7 "Diamond Rapids" Package Surface

Intel's Xeon 7 "Diamond Rapids" seems to have made its first public appearance as actual silicon. Intel had two packages on display at the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference in Shenzhen on October 29, one showing the heat spreader and the other flipped to show the contact side, though photos of them are only now making the rounds. These chips are meant for the massive LGA 9324 socket on Intel's Oak Stream platform, and the bottom side shows a huge pad area to match.

The specs themselves aren't new, since Intel detailed the package design at HOT CHIPS back in August. The flagship packs up to 256 Panther Cove P-cores without SMT, spread across 16 compute chiplets built on Intel 18A-P, along with 1.28 GB of last-level cache. It also gets 16 memory channels with MRDIMM support up to 12,800 MT/s and 128 PCIe Gen 6 lanes. At the event, Intel pitched Diamond Rapids as a CPU designed for agentic AI infrastructure and reportedly announced joint development with Tencent Cloud for its CVM instances. The new Tencent Cloud instances launched at the same event, however, run on Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" chips. Read full story