LTT Labs CT-Scans a Delidded Core i9-14900KS to Map Its Silicon Layout

LTT Labs put a delidded Intel Core i9-14900KS through a Lumafield Neptune industrial CT scanner, following up on a similar scan of the i9-13900K two years earlier. Running the 120 kV machine for a 12-hour exposure with a 2.5 mm copper filter to harden the X-ray beam, they produced an interactive 3D volume that resolves the chip’s internals non-destructively — from the PCB layers and vias to portions of the die’s structure.

The scans surface some of the engineering behind modern high-power CPUs. The rear of the package is packed with capacitors that sit close to the silicon to deliver current for fast, sudden power spikes that motherboard VRMs can’t respond to quickly enough because of their physical distance. Those dense components also introduce imaging noise beneath the die, though the team says the noise pattern is distinguishable from the actual silicon features. In the die imagery they can pick out the E-core and P-core clusters, a central strip carrying cache and bus interconnect, and the flanking integrated GPU, media engines, and support logic.

The piece is a hardware-curiosity teardown rather than a benchmark or analysis, and the raw scan is published for readers to explore. It’s a nice illustration of how far industrial CT imaging can peer into a shipping consumer part built on Intel’s Intel 7 process without cracking it open further.