Intel accidentally leaked its 34-core Raptor Lake chip. What do the dies tell us? 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 …
Yeah, everyone knows what this is, and the author, like the rest of the trade press will happily play along. Months of breathless followup stories and click bait.
Zero chance a wafer for an unreleased chip to "accidentally" get out of a fab in another part of the county/world and land in a trade show case. Zero. That would require a chain of career ending F-ups that would cross multiple departments.
So in the context of a staged leak, this is a play to buy time. Specifically time to market for their new designs, but also a play to protect their share prices in the face of rising interest rates and high inflation, neither of which plays well for a company who's 5 year plan is to set mountains of cash on fire to close the engineering gap with it's rivals.
This processor may be a fun and handy distraction, but it probably won't see production in any form. And it's not like they are saying it will. So no shareholder suit when it fails to materialize. This is a shot across the bow of the other players in the CPU game, not so much a warning shot as a reminder they have a few cannon balls. That and helping them keep the system integrators from developing a wandering eye.
For us the fun will be watching how long it takes to bring an equivalent product to market. Clearly they are heavily implying that something big is right around the corner, but what they showed off is going against the current design and architecture roadmap they have just laid out. This isn't a chiplet based design. So if this ships at all it would be an evolutionary dead end. A last gloriously over the top capstone of an obsolete architecture.
In that light I feel like people are going wow over a wafer of 64 core itaniums, or Netburst cores.
> This isn't a chiplet based design. So if this ships at all it would be an evolutionary dead end. A last gloriously over the top capstone of an obsolete architecture.
Not only that, their yields would be awful. It would be an *expensive* CPU.
Wonder how much it costs the marketing budget to fab a top metal only wafer / "design" that can be leaked?
They probably run some marketing wafers through when they need to test or align one of the machines...
"No problem, Joe dropped a sandwich in ion implanter 5 when he was adjusting it, we'll just run your marketing wafers till it's working again"
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