Analysis  At this week's launch of Intel's 13th-gen Core series, it appears staff accidentally left out on display a wafer of previously undisclosed 3

Intel accidentally leaked its 34-core Raptor Lake chip. What do the dies tell us?

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2022-09-29 19:00:42

Analysis At this week's launch of Intel's 13th-gen Core series, it appears staff accidentally left out on display a wafer of previously undisclosed 34-core Raptor Lake processor dies.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, the wafer bore a sticker reading “Raptor Lake-S, 34 core.” A close inspection of each die revealed a mesh of 34 distinct CPU cores, suggesting these are all performance cores; there's no sign of four-core clusters indicative of Intel’s efficiency cores. The die also appears to depict eight memory controllers — far more than you’d expect to see on a regular desktop chip — as well as UPI blocks, which are only necessary for multi-CPU systems.

The discovery seems to indicate Intel has a Raptor-Lake-family workstation part in development to challenge AMD’s Threadripper processors. Threadripper tops out at 64 cores spread across eight dies. This “Raptor Lake S” die appears to pack just over half that into a single monolithic die. Of course, there’s no guarantee this thing even works or will ever see commercial release.

Chipmakers show off wafers at events, like its Innovation 2022 conference in Silicon Valley this week, to impress journalists, analysts, and customers. The dies are usually already publicly announced components.

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