The move followed weeks of roadmap soul-searching under new data centre boss Kevork Kechichian and rewrites Chipzilla’s next server generation, where AMD’s EPYC Venice and the surviving sixteen-channel Diamond Rapids parts are expected to shift to faster memory and PCIe Gen6 in the second half of 2026 to feed growing AI clusters.

Server builders have been wrestling with the firm’s dual-platform strategy for years. Twelve-channel monsters such as Granite Rapids-AP, Sierra Forest-AP and the incoming Clearwater Forest-AP cram twenty-four DIMMs into a standard rack and leave little room for anything else. AMD’s EPYC crowd pulled the same stunt with its twelve-channel parts, which offer more theoretical bandwidth than older eight-channel setups, even if the real-world story is usually messier.

Chipzilla’s eight-channel Birtch Stream-SP boards still had their perks. They allowed tidy 2-DIMM-per-channel layouts and gave system builders 32 DIMMs across two sockets, which is about a third more than the 12-channel boards manage.

Those 12-channel designs slow down as you stretch trace lengths and stack the slots, so DDR5 performance takes a hit even when half the bays are empty. Despite this, the Xeon 6700 series has remained popular. MLPerf Training v5.1 data showed the Xeon 6700P beating the supposedly posher 6900P in terms of submissions, which surprised a few anoraks.

The eight-channel approach also keeps motherboard and DRAM bills sensible. Buyers who want sixty-four cores per socket without going nuclear on costs can stick to smaller sockets and cheaper modules, which has been a neat point of differentiation for Chipzilla against AMD’s pricier platforms.

Oak Stream and Diamond Rapids originally looked like a cleaner evolution, with both offering eight- and 16-channel options. Sixteen channels effectively give the capacity of an eight-channel two-DIMM-per-channel board without the awkward layout.

Chipzilla’s chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, previously muttered about decisions such as killing Hyper-Threading, making upcoming parts like Diamond Rapids less competitive, which did not help confidence. That fed industry gossip that the eight-channel Diamond Rapids might be on the chopping block. OEMs began hearing that the smaller platform had indeed been removed from the roadmap, while the sixteen-channel version remained safe.

Intel confirmed the rumour, saying: “We have removed Diamond Rapids 8CH from our roadmap. We’re simplifying the Diamond Rapids platform with a focus on 16 Channel processors and extending its benefits down the stack to support a range of unique customers and their use cases.”

The firm has a history of pruning platforms, whether scrapping Cooper Lake variants or flogging its server systems business to MiTAC, so this fits the pattern rather neatly.

It leaves the once-useful small sockets looking increasingly out of place as servers bulk up their memory channels and capacity with each generation.