BGA 4368 socket: CPUs, chipsets and cooler fit

A soldered package for edge servers

BGA 4368 follows the same rule as every BGA package on this site: the processor is soldered once at the factory and stays with the board for life. There are no pins to bend and no lever to lift, but there is also no CPU upgrade path. An edge designer qualifies one SKU for the whole production run, and scaling out means more nodes rather than bigger sockets. The zero UPI links on every SKU confirm that no multi-socket topology exists.

The 77.5 × 50 mm FCBGA4368 footprint needs its own board layout, and the 4-channel memory decision is fixed per board. Compatibility still depends on firmware, so a board revision needs a BIOS that knows the Granite Rapids-D stepping.

Memory, expansion and cooling

Memory on BGA 4368 is DDR5 ECC in 4 channels, up to 6400 MT/s on qualified boards for up to 1.13 TB per socket. Four channels keep 40 cores and 80 threads supplied in firewall, storage and inference mixes. Some boards qualify at 5600 MT/s instead, so the vendor memory list governs exact speeds and population rules.

Expansion comes from 32 lanes of PCIe 5.0 plus 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0 for NVMe storage, high-speed networking and accelerators on a single-socket node. AVX-512 with two FMA ports and DL Boost accelerate inference where the workload uses them. Lane bifurcation follows board firmware, so architects confirm slot maps before committing to a network-heavy layout.

Cooling has no retail answer on BGA 4368. The same package spans the 110 W 6503P-B class outside this batch through the 235 W 6716P-B, and the heatsink is drawn for the configured TDP of that product. The 85 degree case limit suits data halls with steady airflow, and mounting follows the board maker specification rather than a cooler maker socket list.

Where BGA 4368 designs are used

BGA 4368 covers network edge, enterprise storage and industrial servers that need Xeon 6 density without socketed infrastructure. The range scales from 20 cores at 130 W to 40 cores at 235 W in one package, all single-socket with ECC and virtualization features. Boards come from server vendors with qualification for edge temperature and airflow envelopes.

Tower and rack builders meet higher core counts on LGA 4710 instead, where socketed Granite Rapids parts scale to more cores with 12 memory channels and dual-socket topologies. BGA 4368 stays the soldered single-socket home of Granite Rapids-D up to 40 cores. Designs that outgrow it move to BGA 5026 with 64 cores and 8 memory channels.