Intel’s Massive LGA 7529 Socket For Sierra Forest “Birch Stream” CPUs Pictured

The first picture of Intel's LGA 7529 socket, which will be part of the Birch Stream platform and host the Sierra Forest CPUs, has been leaked.

Update: There are even more pictures of the socket and the specific 2S motherboard that is said to be designed for both Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids-AP CPUs. The listing at Goofish (discovered by HXL) suggests that the socket supports up to 128-core and 256-thread Granite Rapids-AP CPUs. The motherboard comes with a 12-channel DDR5 memory layout featuring 2 DIMMs per channel for a total of 24 DIMM slots.

In a picture posted by YuuKi AnS, we get the first look at the LGA 7529 socket which is the largest CPU socket for server x86 CPUs we have seen to date. This socket will be a common sight for the Birch Stream platform which will support Sierra Forest CPUs. You can see that the socket is a pre-production from LOTES and has the socket cover on it so we can't glance our eyes on the insane amount of pins underneath it yet. The socket is surrounded by several DDR5 DIMM slots & a VRM supply.

Now there have been reports that the Intel Birch Stream platform was initially designed for the AP line of processors which has been canceled. So this begs the question if Sierra Forest would be the only CPU lineup designed for the new socket and platform or will there be more chips added in the future.

According to recent Sierra Forest rumors, these Xeon CPUs will be power & performance optimized to support high-density, ultra-efficient compute for the cloud. The Sierra Forest Xeon chips will house at least 344 cores which will be packed within 4 Compute Tiles, and each tile would pack 86 cores. The rumors also point to an even higher core count variant in the form of the 528 core variant which could pack up to 132 cores per tile but will more realistically get 512 cores as one cluster would be disabled.

It is a given at this point that Intel wants to compete against all AMD offerings. While the standard Scalable family competes against the main EPYC opponents, Sierra Forest will be competing with a range of compute-optimized EPYC parts such as the upcoming Bergamo with 128 Zen 4C cores and Falcon Shores will be competing against the custom Instinct APU accelerators which will start with the upcoming MI300 accelerator coming later this year. The Intel Sierra Forest family is expected to land in 2024 and will utilize the 'Intel 3' process node.