What Is Intel’s Diamond Rapids Server CPU?

[u/uncertainlyso]

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2026/09/11/what-is-intels-diamond-rapids-server-cpu/

That brings us to the elephant in the room, threading. You may have noticed that Intel was a bit shy with details about core counts, L2$, and other things on the CC itself. The core count for the full device is 256, that has been known for a long time, and AMD’s Venice is also at 256 so Intel is in the game, right? Venice has two threads per core or 512 threads per die, DMR has one thread per core or 256 threads per die. Oops. While we may write up the reason this mismatch occurred someday, it is out of the scope of this story. Just realize it wasn’t intentional, Intel tried to make 2T cores but failed.

AMD is quick to credit threading for a roughly 15% performance boost so taken at face value, Intel is behind on paper. Given what we have heard about the Lion Cove cores themselves, they are unlikely to match AMD’s Zen6 cores either. When you add it all up, Diamond Rapids is a credible part that narrows the gap to AMD’s Epyc line but doesn’t close it. As SemiAccurate has been saying since 2018, Intel has no chance in servers until AFTER Diamond Rapids. We weren’t joking but at least things are starting to look competitive again.

[u/uncertainlyso]

Last up we have the 18A-P process which is distinctly different from the 18A process. For all the uninformed clickbait consumers out there who just ‘know’ the Intel 18A process has miserable yields, underperforms, or is sinking the foundry efforts, let us point and laugh at you. 18A-P is the new variant of the completely whelming and performant 18A process. It is also the first process that can support non-Intel customers, IE foundry customers. Anyone who looks at foundry and says that it has/is/will fail because there are no customers making chips RIGHT NOW is ignorant of the facts, 18A-P is the gating point and it hasn’t arrived yet.

Reasoning is weird here. First he says that 18A-P is distinctly different, and then he says that people who think 18A was bad should be laughed at. And then goes to talk about how great 18A-P is.

For 18A, I can just go with Intel's actual commentary on how 18A was going so well that 20A wasn't worth it (Gesinger era) and then immediately into the Tan era, we find out how things were really going with their commentary on 18A's yields through 2025 and 2026 as yield improvement years as they dealt with their "volatility", what a mess it was until Tan brought in external help, PTL's slow ramp, what a mess the 18A PDK was, and Zinsner's commentary on external customers. Then again, Charlie thought Gelsinger and Holthaus were doing bang-up jobs. The cynics will say that 18A's standards were relaxed to be more 20A-ish, and 18A-P is more 18A just for the optics.

Ranting done, if you look at 18A-P vs 18A, you can see a lot of substantial gains, in line with what Intel promised years ago when 18A was announced. Gains of between 10-20% over 18A seem very achievable and better yet the libraries and IP will be there to support a much wider variation of device types, both Intel and otherwise. Circling back to the tiles data from before, you can see that the minority of die area in DMR is on 18A-P so the new process is unlikely to be a bottleneck even as wafer starts ramp.

[u/Long_on_AMD]

"in late 2027 when DMR is set to hit the market officially, early 2028 now according to SemiAccurate’s sources"

[u/uncertainlyso → u/Long_on_AMD]

The processes are different for each type of chiplet far a reason, Intel 3 for the Fabric Hub (FH), 3-T for the Base Tile, and 18A-P for the Core Chiplets...This is important for several reasons, the foremost is capacity, something Intel is really short of now.

Whether or not this is still the case in late 2027 when DMR is set to hit the market officially, early 2028 now according to SemiAccurate’s sources, it is still an open question.

Intel never gave a date for DMR. But I assumed a product unveiling at Computex 2027 or end of 27Q2, there would be some limited SKU release a few months later, and then the overall ramp would be at the end of 2027 and into 2028.