Today, in the latest GeekBench 5 submission by ASUS, we have discovered something rather interesting. Intel's Ice Lake-SP processors were rumored to arrive with up to 28 cores and 56 threads at maximum, on a single chip. That was due to the 10 nm process used to make these chips, with suspicions that the yield of the node was not good enough to make any higher core count parts. Thanks to the GB5 listing, discovered by Leakbench on Twitter, the Intel Ice Lake-SP CPU engineering sample appeared with an amazing 36 cores with 72 threads. This is supposedly Intel's efforts to try and match the 64 cores and 128 threads of AMD's EPYC "Rome" CPUs, which are winning many server applications due to their performance.
