(Image credit: Intel) Last year, Intel canceled the 8-channel variant of its upcoming Diamond Rapids server lineup, choosing instead to focus on only the 16-channel SKUs. The "Xeon 7" family was originally supposed to launch later this year, but new information from leaker Jaykihn suggests it's been pushed back to 2027. That means Diamond Rapids won't be able to compete directly with AMD's EPYC Venice CPUs that're (still) slated for 2026. The leak also says, at launch, the Diamond Rapids family will top out at 256 cores (all P-cores), but 512-core silicon will follow a few months later, both featuring 16-channel memory. That means up to 1.6 TB/s of throughput thanks to MRDIMM 2 support. The P-cores inside Diamond Rapids will be using the "Panther Cove-X" architecture , and both the 256- and 512-core lineups are rumored to be compatible with the LGA9324 socket .…