Hands on with the 56-core Xeon Platinum 9200 CPU: Intel’s Biggest CPU Package Ever

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When Intel announced the new Cascade Lake family as officially launched last week, it added a new product segment to its portfolio – the ‘Advanced Performance’ or AP. These come in the form of the Xeon Platinum 9200 family, and feature two of Intel’s high-end processors within a single package, offering double the cores and double the memory in a much denser environment. These processors are focusing purely on density, and are BGA only so they will only be sold as complete systems by OEMs, who actually buy them from Intel and make modifications. We had the opportunity to hold one of these big CPUs and take some pictures.

The package measures 76.0 x 72.5 mm, making it Intel’s largest CPU based* package ever, beating out the old Intel Pentium Pro, which was 67.6 x 62.5 mm, and AMD’s EPYC package, which is 75.4 x 58.5 mm.

Inside the package is two XCC enabled silicon die, one designated a master, and one a slave. The die themselves are ~694mm2 each.

The Biggest Baller In The Park

The socket is officially called FCBGA5903, which stands for flip-chip ball-grid array 5903, with 5903 being the number of contacts or ‘balls’ on the underside which goes onto the motherboard, much like an embedded chip. By contrast, AMD’s EPYC chip has 4094 pins. The reason for all these contacts are mostly in the memory: as this Platinum 9200 processor has twelve memory channels, these all require pins. There are also some more for power, as the TDP for the 56-core version is 400W.

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