Intel SoMa Discussion

[CHips]

Or Intel just wanting to troll collectors :p ?

[CPUShack]

[karman]

100k is too large quantity just for the lol or mechanical samples...

[CHips]

Still nobody tried to make a Die Shot?

Looks like everyone forgot about this chip now...

[crazybubba64]

[Birdman.]

Fritz took die shot of SoMa https://www.flickr.com/photos/130561288@N04/ so we can see inside those. Seems to be something with 8x8x4 cores on one die that really is just four dies together cut out of wafer as one piece. Those cores seem to have transistor standard cells, so not really possible to know more about them. Then there's some simple I/O bus and PLL common for one group of 64 cores. Maybe those are some custom cores for crypto mining or other highly parallel special task, but seems to be 1024 cores in one package with four dies.

[max1024]

[xsecret]

As expected, that looks like mostly passive to me. Big resistor array, couple transistors and nothing fancy. That’s really close to a terminator IC for some bus that requires a final resistor on the chain (like memory). But it seems to be a (very) basic support chip and not a super-secret unknown CPU architecture. I still have doubt this has been manufactured by Intel, only packaged.

[i440bx]

*digging out this old thread*

Inspired by a sale today i used google anf found that:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/314359727145

Some german forum:

https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/xeon-soma-geheimnisvolles-mcm-design-von-intel-aufgetaucht.1253461/page-2#post-27376609

(Posting #50, Page2)

And this Reddit discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/e082ng/information_request_on_intel_soma/

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If you have some more news let me know. I wanted to add all this infos here if someone is searching again

[i440bx]

And a Video of the cores

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X0joJPyfoHg

[gg1978]

I found this link that i didn't see here before...

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1164209-about-an-amazing-intel-soma-cpu%EF%BC%88lga1156%EF%BC%89/


Looks interesting whatever it is..

[gg1978]

Looks like Lohi is a typo..

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/loihi

[oldirdey]

special heatspreader for a special cpu

[mavroxur]

[Binary_Nexus]

About a year or so ago I did some electrical testing on the pads of a SoMa to see what the connections were like and this is what I found.

Blue is almost certainly VSS/GND and green is probably VCC/PWR
The other colours were just other tests and I didn't get around to fully testing those, but there's some resistance between them.

I don't believe that these were mechanical samples.
Also, if you look very closely around the pads with a strong light on them, you'll notice very faint outlines around groups of pads, corresponding to pads that are connected together directly.