Intel's 256-core Xeon 7 CPUs are a Diamond in the rough

DEEP DIVE Intel's Xeon 7 platform, better known by its codename Diamond Rapids, was supposed to launch this year with up to 192 cores backed by a whopping 16 memory channels.

But that's not going to happen.

This being Intel, the launch was, to no one's great surprise, delayed until 2027 to give what remains of the company's engineering team time to cut and polish the chip — and polish they certainly have.

At the Hot Chips show this week, Intel revealed the chip won't ship with 192 cores after all — but hold your disappointment because Chipzilla's flagship SKU will actually cram 256 performance cores into a single socket.

In fact, spec-for-spec, the platform is surprisingly well positioned to compete with AMD's sixth-gen Venice Epycs, which will also top out at 256 cores.

Well, at least on the high end it will.

An eye on HPC As we reported earlier this year, Diamond Rapids won't be a mainstream part.

It lacks hyperthreading — what the rest of the industry calls simultaneous multithreading — entirely and it can only be offered in high-core-count SKUs aimed at HPC applications.

There will be no eight channel Diamond Rapids-SP parts.

Those got canned earlier this year, which leaves us with just the high-end AP variants.

These always are the cooler of the two anyway, but they're not what enterprises have historically bought.

What this means is Diamond Rapids — which for the sake of brevity we're going to refer to as DMR from here on out — won't compete with AMD in every regime, just the very top end.

Intel's next chip, known as Coral Rapids, will see the return of hyperthreading and presumably the next round of SP processors, but we wouldn't write off DMR just yet.

The chip is without a doubt Intel's most sophisticated Xeon ever built.