Intel bumps Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids to 256 cores, slips to 2027

Intel used its Hot Chips slot this week to announce that Diamond Rapids, the Xeon 7 that was supposed to ship this year with 192 cores, will instead arrive in 2027 carrying up to 256 performance cores in a single socket. In The Register's deep dive, systems editor Tobias Mann writes that the chip stitches together as many as 22 chiplets: sixteen compute dies on Intel's 18A-P node, four compute-building-block base dies on Intel 3-T, and two fabric hub dies on Intel 3, bonded with Foveros 3D direct hybrid bonding.

The AI-relevant additions live in the compute dies. Cores add FP8 support to Intel's AMX matrix extensions "for on-CPU machine learning workloads," alongside full AVX 10.2. Feeding them is "16 channels of DDR5 at 8,000 MT/s, or 12,800 MT/s when using MRDIMMs," plus 128 lanes of PCIe 6.0 / CXL 3 / UPI 3, and 320 MB of L3 per building block, up to 1.28 GB across a top-spec SKU.

Diamond Rapids is not a mainstream part. Intel has cancelled the eight-channel SP variants and will ship only the high-end AP configuration, and the chip drops simultaneous multithreading entirely. Mann writes the launch slipped "to give what remains of the company's engineering team time to cut and polish the chip."

On the headline spec, 256 cores brings Intel level with AMD's sixth-generation Venice Epycs, which target the same core count, 16 memory channels and roughly 600-watt TDPs. Diamond Rapids is the third Hot Chips 2026 datacenter silicon reveal in our AI Infrastructure tracker this week, alongside Nvidia's 88-core Vera CPU and OpenAI's Broadcom-built Jalapeño inference ASIC.