Leaked slides suggest the processor could boast up to 192 high-performance cores, with support for as many as 16 DDR5 memory channels and a thermal envelope that stretches to 500W.

The new chips will reportedly sit on the Oak Stream platform and arrive in a new LGA9324 socket, with second-generation MRDIMM memory modules potentially pushing memory bandwidth past 1.6 TB/s.

That would be nearly double the peak 844 GB/s on offer from the current Granite Rapids line. It also points to PCIe 6.x support, possibly with CXL on top, and an unknown number of extra PCIe 4.x lanes for good measure.

Under the hood, Diamond Rapids is expected to use up to six chiplets, including four compute tiles built on the Intel 18A process, each packing 48 cores. These would be joined by two I/O tiles handling memory, PCIe, UPI, and other housekeeping.

The cores themselves are based on the new Panther Cove microarchitecture, which brings refined AMX extensions and support for FP8 and TF32 formats for the AI and HPC crowd. Despite being a major update, there’s no word yet from Chipzilla on a tape-in or power-on milestone, which raises eyebrows given the expected 2026 launch window.

On paper, this chip sounds like a worthy adversary to AMD’s EPYC 9006 ‘Venice’ processors, which are also aiming for 2026 with up to 256 Zen 6c cores. It sets the stage for a fresh server brawl between the two silicon heavyweights, but until Intel makes it official, this leak should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Still, if these specs hold, Chipzilla might finally have something to bark about again in the data centre.