The A0 stepping of Intel’s upcoming Xeon Sierra Forest processors has leaked out, courtesy of @yuuki_ans. It includes info regarding two chips: A 96-core and a 144-core CPU. Both have a TDP of 350W, the same as Sapphire Rapids and AMD’s Bergamo cloud offerings. On the memory side, the 96-core part features 72MB of L3, while the 144-core part scales it up to 108 MB.
Sierra Forest will be part of Intel’s 5th Gen Xeon family. With up to 144 Crestmont “E” cores, they’ll go up against the growing crowd of Arm processors in the cloud segment. AMD’s recently released Epyc Bergamo chips are their closest competition.
Sierra Forest will be fabbed on the Intel 3 process node, refining the Intel 4 node with high-performance libraries. The Birch Stream platform will leverage the LGA 7529 socket, the largest x86 server socket to date. As per rumors, it’ll support Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids, the P-core-based 6th Gen Xeon lineup with a peak TDP capacity of 500W.
Regarding I/O support, we’re looking at 12-channel DDR5 with two DIMMs per channel for a total of 24 DIMMs. Birch Stream will feature PCIe Gen 5 and CXL 1.3. A recent leak included a test board with 6 PCIe Gen 5 x16 links, and 6×24 UPI links.
