Intel has a wafer full of Raptor Lake dies on display here at Innovation 2022 here in San Jose, but after closer examination, it became apparent that the wafer contains 34-core Raptor Lake processors that haven't been announced. That's exciting because Intel had already announced its Raptor Lake chips today with a peak of 24 cores, but there wasn't any mention of a 34-core model.
A closer look at the wafer implies that the design is not of the standard Raptor Lake CPUs. As you can see, the cores aren't aligned horizontally in two rows as we see with the typical Raptor Lake die (you can see an Intel diagram of the Raptor Lake-S desktop chips in the second slide of the above album).
Additionally, the 34 cores appear to be interconnected with a mesh, like the Ice Lake models (third album image), and not the familiar ring we see with Intel's desktop PC chips.
The presenters were unaware that this is a die of announced 34-core chips, and there was some confusion at the booth. After some discussion with the booth staff and predictions that these were Ice Lake processors, the presenter showed us proof that the die was of actual Raptor Lake silicon -- the back of the die contains a sticker that makes it clear as day with a label that says "Raptor Lake-S 34-Core."
The die appears larger than the die that drops into the standard desktop PCs with the LGA 1700 socket, and it appears that it is too large to fit inside the package for desktop PCs. That means this is likely a CPU that's destined for the workstation market.
Additionally, the die contains 34 distinct core areas that appear to be connected by a mesh, meaning these are all likely high-performance cores (p-cores) and the design doesn't include quad-core clusters of e-cores like we see with desktop PC models. As a reminder, the peak configuration for the desktop is eight p-cores and 16 e-cores.
We first discovered the wafer in the booth but it wasn't readily apparent that the dies were larger than the desktop dies we saw in Israel (in the image below). After a discussion with the booth staff and Dr. Ian Cuttress of More Than Moore , the booth staff, who were unaware that these were unreleased CPUs, discovered the sticker underneath and realized that this was a wafer of unreleased CPU silicon.
This is breaking news...we'll update with more analysis soon.