"This is where I think our R&D has done exceptionally well in terms of leveraging existing EUV technology while setting an aggressive technology scaling roadmap," says Kevin Zhang, deputy co-chief operations officer and senior vice president at TSMC. "This is definitely a strength."
Sorano will be available with up to 84 Zen 5 cores - up from 64 on Siena - in a power envelope of just 225 watts. AMD isn't ready to spill all the beans on its latest Epyc just yet, but based on core count alone, we surmise the chip will either feature six density-optimized Zen 5c chiplets with 14 of 16 cores enabled or 12 of the frequency-optimized Zen 5 variety with one of the eight cores fused off.
Intel hasn't made it easy to buy a flagship desktop chip. The company's 2022 and 2023 Raptor Lake chips ran hot, power-hungry, and had those infamous crashes, while 2024's Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 9 285K had lackluster gaming performance that the company has tried to address with updates.
The Xeon 600 lineup spans the gamut between 12 and 86 performance cores (no cut-down efficiency cores here), with support for between four and eight channels of DDR5 and 80 to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Compared to its aging W-3500-series chips, Intel is claiming a 9 percent uplift in single threaded workloads and up to 61 percent higher performance in multithreaded jobs, thanks in no small part to an additional 22 processor cores this generation.