Intel’s Huge LGA 7529 Next Gen Socket For 500+ Core Xeon CPUs Smiles For The Camera
by
Zak Killian
—
Saturday, March 25, 2023, 02:55 PM EDT
Four days ago, we reported on a leak revealing quite a few key details about Intel's upcoming ultra-high-end server platform for Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest-family Xeon processors. Well, today, we've got what purports to be a pile of leaked screenshots of early sample motherboards for those processors, and it's a lot to take in.
We mean that literally, by the way; the LGA 7529 processors are absolutely gigantic. We've already seen pictures of the socket before, but to put things in perspective, Twitter leaker 포시포시 (@harukaze5719 on Twitter) made a composite image that stacks an LGA 1700 CPU on top of one of the just-released Sapphire Rapids Xeons inside the LGA 7529 socket. The desktop chip is not even one-quarter of the size of the enormous Xeon socket.
The majestic size of the CPU socket becomes understandable when you hear what is supposed to go into it. There aren't actually any details about what Intel's LGA7529 CPUs will be like, but the rumors are extremely interesting: 86-core and 132-core CPUs with Cove architecture (like P-cores), as well as versions made up entirely of E-cores with as many as 512 CPU cores. Supposedly there will be CPUs with HBM, too.
The giant socket backplate completely fills the man's hand.
You can see a total of twelve memory slots on these pre-production motherboards, and indeed, the LGA7529 CPUs are expected to have twelve-channel memory. We're also looking at 96 PCIe 5.0 links per CPU socket, which ain't bad at all, but doesn't quite match up to AMD's latest offerings with 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes.
The Chinese idiom for this phenomenon is "squeezing toothpaste," referring to how companies intentionally limit their products rather than going for broke. Chinese netizens refer to Intel as the "toothpaste factory" due to its history of aggressive market segmentation.
As a gamer and enthusiast overclocker, what's on the engineering sample motherboard is all pretty exotic. Those 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes get split across several MCIO ports, a huge CXL x32 interface (that the leaker describes as Gen-Z), and a single standard PCIe x8 slot that's on the bottom of the motherboard for some reason. As this is a test sample, we can only imagine that everything here is strictly for testing purposes anyway.
s
The original leaker on Bilibili describes the LGA7529 platform as "coming soon," which seems optimistic to us given how long it took Sapphire Rapids to hit the market and the strong paucity of leaks regarding CPUs for the socket. We would be surprised if we see anything released on LGA7529 before 2024.
s
