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

What happened

Intel's Xeon 7 "Diamond Rapids" has made its first public appearance as actual silicon: at the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference in Shenzhen on October 29, Intel displayed two packages, one showing the heat spreader and one flipped to show the contact side, though photos are only now circulating. The chips are meant for the massive LGA 9324 socket on Intel's Oak Stream platform. The specs are not new, as 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, with 1.28 GB of last-level cache, 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; however, the new Tencent Cloud instances launched at the same event run on Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" chips.

Impact and signal

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Source and time

Source: TechPowerUp · 11/11/2026 · View original source