YuuKi_AnS has brought renewed attention to an already leaked Intel "Emerald Rapids" processor—the 5th Gen Xeon Platinum 8580 CPU was identified with 60 cores and 120 threads in a previous post, but a follow up has appeared in the form of an engineering prototype (ES2-Q2SP-A0). Yuuki noted: "samples are for reference only, and the actual performance is subject to the official version." Team Blue has revealed a launch date—December 14 2023—for its 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processor lineup, so it is not surprising to see pre-release examples appear online a couple of months beforehand. This particular ES2 SKU (on A0 silicon) fields an all P-Core configuration consisting of Raptor Cove units, with a dual-chiplet design (30 cores per die). There is a significant bump up in cache sizes when compared to the current "Sapphire Rapids" generation—Wccftech outlines these allocations: "Each core comes with 2 MB of L2 cache for up to 120 MB of L2 cache. The whole chip also features 300 MB of L3 cache which combines to offer a total cache pool of 420 MB."

They bring in some of the competition for comparison: "That's a 2.6x increase in cache versus the existing Sapphire Rapids CPU lineup and while it still doesn't match the 480 MB L3 cache of standard (AMD) Genoa or the 1.5 GB cache pool of Genoa-X, it is a good start for Intel to catch up." Team Blue appears ready to take on AMD on many levels—this week's Innovation Event produced some intriguing announcements including "Sierra Forest vs. Bergamo" and plans to embrace 3D Stacked Cache technology. Yuuki's small batch of screenshots show the Xeon Platinum 8580 CPU's captured clock speeds are far from the finished article—just a touch over 2.0 GHz, so very likely limited to safe margins. An unnamed mainboard utilizing Intel's Eagle Stream platform was logged sporting a dual-socket setup—the test system was running a grand total of 120 cores and 240 threads!