Hot Chips 2026: Intel’s Diamond Rapids

Hello you fine Internet folks,Intel unveiled their upcoming Diamond Rapids Server CPU at Computex where they said that Diamond Rapids has twice the memory bandwidth, PCIe Gen 6, and 50% more cores than Granite Rapids.However, it looks like in the 3 or so months since Computex, Intel has changed at least one key specification of Diamond Rapids.Rome Wasn’t Built in a DayAt last year’s Hot Chips, Intel talked about Clearwater Forest where they showed off their first 3D stacked server processor.Clearwater Forest took the same 2 I/O dies plus 3 compute die layout that Granite Rapids had and moved the compute into dedicated dies with just the cores and L2 cache stacked on top of the base dies with the L3 cache on it. Diamond Rapids changes this layout in a significant way.The layout of Diamond Rapids’ different dies look quite similar to AMD Venice’s layout with the Compute Dies on the edges of the IO dies. However, there are some large differences with the packaging.Firstly, all Diamond…