Massive LGA7529 Socket for Intel’s ‘Sierra Forest’ Pictured

The first photos of Intel’s LGA7529 socket have been published by a hardware leaker. @YuuKi_AnSThe CPU uses a tiny Atom-class energy-efficient core and plugs into a massive 7529-pin socket.

Intel’s Xeon ‘Sierra Forest’ processors and Birch Stream platform are designed for high-density cloud data centers. They are meant to run workloads that benefit primarily from core counts rather than single-threaded performance. As such, the Sierra Forest system-on-chip will have significantly more cores than his usual Xeon processors based on high-performance cores such as Emerald Rapids and Granite Rapids.

Sierra Forest uses a large number of pins to supply data and power to these cores. On the other hand, Intel’s LGA7529 socket doesn’t look significantly larger than the company’s LGA4677 for Xeon Scalable ‘Sapphire Rapids’ processors and their successors. At least when you compare the size of both sockets to nearby DDR5 memory slots.

Unfortunately, the published images don’t reveal many new details about the Sierra Forest CPUs, such as core counts and memory channels. Still, the availability of LGA7529 motherboards means that server makers are likely (or soon to be) testing future CPUs.