— 𝐷𝑟. 𝐼𝑎𝑛 𝐶𝑢𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠 (@IanCutress) September 28, 2022 Intel had wafers for their 13th gen CPUs on display. Paul Acron and Ian Cutress at first sight realized that these wafers were larger than the Raptor Lake dies they’ve seen. Only to realize that Intel accidentally had a few unreleased CPUs at their booth. Paul states that these CPUs are not your average Raptor Lake wafers. The cores are not aligned horizontally as is the case with Raptor Lake’s design. In addition, the 34 cores are interconnected in a mesh formation and not in a ring bus design as we see with Raptor Lake. To sum it up, Paul mentions that this is most likely the Sapphire Rapids HEDT MCC die. Skyjuice on Twitter shared a mock-up of this wafer along with the specifications. The unnamed Sapphire Rapids 34 cored CPU ships with 68MB of L2 cache along with 63.75MB of L3 cache. In addition, we see 8 DDR5 memory controllers and up to 80 PCIe Gen 5 lanes. The CPU features a monolithic design on the Intel 7 (10nm) process. The die spans across an area of 780mm² making it Intel’s largest die ever.
Conclusion
This is a major leak for Intel’s upcoming HEDT lineup. However, we are not expected to see these CPUs in action by atleast 2023. Sapphire Rapids goes up to a max of 56 cores and 112 threads, so this most likely is a budget-entry level server CPU. Intel’s Sapphire Rapids will compete against AMD’s Milan. However, team blue is late to the party as AMD’s next-gen Genoa is just around the corner.
