Intel SoMa Discussion

[crazybubba64]

Since these chips have been fairly popular and mysterious, I figure we should have a place to discuss them.

For those uninformed of these parts, they have been cropping up online in very very large quantities lately. It is estimated that at least 100,000 of the chips exist based off of a picture of one of the seller's stacks of boxes containing them. It is unlikely that these are simple mechanical or thermal samples, yet evidence of a working system has yet to surface (as of the time of writing)

There are two known flavors of these: SoMa and SoMa-B3.
The s-spec printed on their bulk packaging is SR26U.
The IPN of these is CMLIVADIA, which seems to be a codename. (Named after a city in Crimea?)
None of these chips show the Intel logo or copyright text, yet they were sent in for e4 RoHS compliance.

These chips are all dated late 2014 based off of lot codes and packing dates.

They use a similar pin arrangement to LGA1156, but do not have any SMT components on the bottom or under the IHS.


Anyone have an idea what these are supposed to be?


I have a crackpot theory that seems to line up with the dates of the chips.
In 2015, the U.S. Government forbade Intel from selling Xeon Phi CPU's to China for their supercomputers.
I think these were special one-off CPUs for a cancelled supercomputer collaboration. Maybe they were using cores similar to other Xeon Phi chips on a smaller scale?

[cvandijk]

I reed somewhere that some people think that they are atom cores?

[xsecret]

Where is the picture about the "seller's stacks of boxes containing them" ?

For sure, we need a die shot to be sure, but I expect only a resistor array. No decoupling caps = no transistors.

[CPUShack]

[xsecret]

But why a S-Spec (final retail product) ?

My guess is this is NOT an Intel Product (I mean, based on Intel's IPs). Maybe an attempt from a third party (Panasonic ?) to use Intel's factory. That was planned in 2014 and match the time line. Check this:

https://techreport.com/news/26751/panasonic-socs-to-be-fabbed-on-intels-14-nm-process/

[max1024]

It is not a SoMa LOL, it is future intel i9-11990K Look like modern AMD Ryzen =) 4 chiplets ))

[crazybubba64]

[rjluna2]

[debs3759]

I'm waiting impatiently for someone with the right equipment to post die shots to help identify them.

[Marcin]

He has hijacked Intel transport or what ?
This quantity disclaims any kind of sample in my opinion.

[CPUShack]

[debs3759]

I'll LMAO if they turn out to be elaborate and ambitious fakes

[svmlegacy]

Just throwing this out there as the thought just occurred to me, what if they are in fact atom chips (Potentially Silvermont/Airmont) MCP's, part of a cancelled order due to the high failure rate in high load conditions for this architecture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvermont#Erratum Either that, or a test bed for this erratum that didn't require full core functionality (potentially not needing the SMD's), but many examples for statistical significance of failure modes?

Either way, I'd like to get my hands on one, and I'll be very excited to see die shots come up.

[max1024]

Looking at these photos, I do not think that this is a finished product that can work.
https://imgur.com/a/Ea4x0bJ

Not a single capacitor. Strange..

[debs3759]