A massive 34-core Intel Raptor Lake chip just showed up out of nowhere

pcgamer.com:

A few weeks ago I held a Raptor Lake wafer in my own two hands, however, it looked absolutely nothing like the Raptor Lake wafer just spotted at Intel Innovation by Paul Alcorn for our sister site Tom's Hardware(opens in new tab). So what gives?

This new wafer shows off a fundamentally different chip design to the 'standard' Raptor Lake-S wafers we've seen so far. Rather than two rows of P-cores butting up against four clusters of E-cores—for a maximum of 24 cores in total, a la the Core i9 13900K—what we're seeing on this unannounced wafer is an interconnected grid of what appears to be solely P-cores. 34 of them.

This sort of die layout is more expected of Intel's server-grade processors, starting with those based on the Skylake architecture. It works by increasing interconnectivity by having more cores connected directly to one another, reducing the bottlenecks that could happen with high core count chips on a ring bus architecture.

Intel had previously brought these sorts of remixed server chips to the enthusiast and workstation market under the X-series branding, though that all stopped when desktop core counts skyrocketed. We've not seen an X-series processor since 2019, which was when Intel released Cascade Lake, led by the 18-core Intel Core i9 10980XE.

It's possible then that we're going to see a return of these sorts of high-end processors on the desktop. Alcorn says the team over at Intel Innovation, while initially unsure of what the wafer was, did spot a sticker on the wafer that notes it as «Raptor Lake-S 34-core». That's a bit surprising, as the Raptor Lake-S lineup is one and the same with the desktop processors readying for launch next month(opens in new tab).

The 34-core die appears significantly larger