At Computex 2025, we saw a number of neat cooling solutions. Some of them were for next-generation platforms. At the Auras booth, we saw next-gen coolers for the upcoming AMD SP7 platform. We also saw the upcoming Intel Oak Stream liquid cooling cold plates that are set to cool next-gen Xeon CPUs.
Auras Shows Next-Gen Intel Oak Stream Cold Plates at Computex 2025
In the company’s booth, the cold plates that caught our team’s gaze were the giant Intel Oak Stream coolers. At 156.0mm by 107.5mm by 24.2mm, these cold plates were notably larger than the AMD SP7 coolers.
Another industry rumor that we have heard many times recently is that the Intel socket was changed late, and we are not sure of which version this was for. The challenge was that with 16-channel memory CPUs the original Oak Stream sockets were too wide to fit in half-widh compute sleds next to a full set of 16 DIMMs on each side. As such, we have heard that the socket was slightly adjusted but there will still be challenges in half-width platforms with the new Intel socket.
It also appears as though Intel is sticking with the four post retention design, but it appears to have changed the retention mechanism in the next generation.
Final Words
Liquid cooling is only going to become more pervasive. While 2U servers will not need liquid cooling in the next generation, many of the accelerated servers and importantly accelerated data centers will move towards supporting liquid cooling by default. As such, seeing cold plate design like this earlier in the development process is always neat. Of course, the more interesting part would have been seeing a motherboard or chip, but at least we have some idea of the next-generation Oak Stream platforms given this Auras cooler.
I started to read this learning about a cooler. Instead I’m learning about future Xeon development. Neato