Intel Diamond Rapids to boost core counts to 192, but RIP Hyperthreading
Threads on a half shell, Intel power!
COMPUTEX 2026 Intel’s upcoming Diamond Rapids Xeon will boost core counts to 192, a 50 percent increase over last generation, the x86 giant revealed at Computex in Taipei this week.But while core counts continue to rise, in doing so Intel has managed to cut thread counts by a quarter.Yep, Hyperthreading – Intel's marketing for simultaneous multithreading – is officially dead.
Intel first added support for SMT all the way back in 2002. The technology boosted utilization by enabling two threads to harness idle execution units during a single cycle. While SMT doesn’t double throughput, for certain applications it can deliver double-digit percentage gains.
After slowly abandoning the tech across its consumer product lineup, Intel's Xeons are latest to get the cut. Except, wait! It seems Intel may have seen the error of its ways, and is already reversing course on the decision. Intel’s next next Xeon, codenamed Coral Rapids, will bring SMT back.The jump from 128 to 192 is a big jump for Intel, but still smaller than the AMD is making with its 256-core Venice Epycs. If that weren’t enough, it looks like AMD could beat Intel to market by as much as a year.Diamond Rapids is now slated for release sometime in 2027.Echos of Epyc, notes of MonakaIn addition to core count, we also got our first look at how Intel will stitch the chip together. It turns out AMD might have been onto something when it started gluing silicon together back in 2017, because Intel’s next round Xeons look more like an Epyc under the hood than ever.
