Intel Ice Lake Xeon 10nm Processor Leak Confirms 8-Channel Memory And LGA4189 Socket

Intel's next Xeon server platform is called Cascade Lake, and it looms just around the corner. After that, however, Intel will launch its 10nm Ice Lake chips. Details on Ice Lake have been pretty sparse up to this point, though some key details about the platform has been revealed by Power Stamp Alliance, which tasks itself with creating collaborative solutions for 48V-to-low-voltage on-boad isolated and non-isolated DC-DC power converters, and its members such as Bel Power Solutions.

Some of the information is contained in documentation for an evaluation board that Power Stamp Alliance created to help customers who are working with Intel's current and future processors. It supports a range of Intel Xeon CPUs, including Skylake, Cascade Lake, and Knights Mill (Xeon Phi). According to the documentation, it also supports Intel's unreleased Ice Lake family of Xeon processors, by way of an adapter. Unlike the other supported Xeon chips, all of which are LGA3647 parts, the documentation lists a new LGA4189 socket for Ice Lake (hence the adapter).


So, Intel is working on a new socket design for Ice Lake. Unless the Power Stamp Alliance is misinformed, the power pin arrangement between LGA4189 and LGA3647 are compatible through an adapter. That doesn't mean the processors are as well, though it does suggest a similar power arrangement between Skylake, Cascade Lake, and Ice Lake. The documentation also lists an increased power limit, with a TDP listed as "up to 230W" versus 140-205W for Skylake and 165-205W for Cascade Lake.


It also looks like Ice Lake processors will feature native 8-channel DDR4 memory support. One of the images shows that each processor is connected to 16 dedicated DIMM slots. That is a bump from the six-channel DDR4 memory support on Skylake. Bumping up to an 8-channel design hints at Ice Lake Xeon platforms supporting 1TB of memory, up from 768GB, though that wasn't confirmed in any of the documents or images.

And that's what we have to go on at this point. The Power Stamp Alliance is supposed to provide more information at the Open Compute Summit in May, so perhaps we'll have a bigger picture of Ice Lake in just a few weeks.