TECH NEWS – Twelve-channel DDR5 support sounds good, but the TDP of up to 500 watts is scary…

The next generation of Xeon processors isn’t tailored for traditional desktop PCs (but the LGA2011-3 platform is still alive in cheap used PCs today, offering good value for money!), according to a leak a new platform is coming in the future. Currently, Intel is supporting Sapphire Rapids-SP on the Eagle Stream platform, and Emerald Rapids-SP processors are coming later this year using the LGA 4677 socket. After that, the Mountain Stream and Birch Stream platforms will follow. The latter will be reserved for high-end Xeon processors, including Granite Rapids-AP and Sierra Forest-AP.

These will be put on Intel’s Avenue City motherboards with a 16.7*20″ design and 20 PCB layers. The processors will receive 13-layer packaging. The reference platform has two stunningly large LGA 7529 sockets supporting Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest-AP processors. These can have TDPs of up to 500W. 24 DDR5 DIMMs, 12 channels of memory support, 6 PCIe Gen 5 x16 links (Gen5/CXL), and 6×24 UPI links – these are not designed for traditional use and speed either, especially when you add that Granire Rapids-AP processors will have up to 128 cores and 256 threads and follow HBM (high bandwidth memory) format as seen in the engineering sample (ES) models.

The 24 DDR5 DIMMs can be up to 6400 Mbps in 1DPC configuration, but with the MCR (multiplexer combined rank) approach, it can go up to 8000. The Avenue City reference platform also features two PCIe x2 M.2 slots, a PCIe x2 M.2 (2280) module, a PCIe x1 LOM (Springville), a ton of I/O (rear USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, Type-C serial port, mini DP, gigabit ethernet switch, RunBCM module (AST2600)), and for security, the motherboard also features TPM 2.0, SPI TOM and PFR 4.0.

For these motherboards, a simple chassis will not suffice (2S Open Chassis Standard EGS POK or 2S 4U closed solution with Rich AIC). Wearing ESD gloves is recommended during the installation of the processor to avoid contamination or oxidation from external materials. Interestingly, all this information is about the Birch Stream platform. At the same time, not much is known about Mountain Stream (e.g., that Granite Rapids will have standard P-Core cores, Redwood Core cores will use Intel’s 4nm node; and Sierra Forest will only be an E-Core solution to contend with AMD’s Bergamo Zen 4C design for compute/efficiency ratio).

Intel’s Sapphire Rapids family did not start well, so it is not out of the question that the Granite Rapids Xeon CPUs will not keep the release target towards the end of 2024 (the same goes for Sierra Forest).

Source: WCCFTech