Intel Announces Xeon 6+ For Clearwater Forest CPUs

Details during the Clearwater Forest briefing at Intel Tech Tour Arizona were rather light… Especially as for what’s known about the cores already from prior events like Hot Chips and other Intel disclosures around the Darkmont E-core. But we do now know the branding: Xeon 6+ for Clearwater Forest.

Clearwater Forest as the first Intel 18A data center processors will be marketed as Xeon 6+ processors rather than going for Xeon 7 or any other naming convention. The slide did not note Diamond Rapids as the expected successor to Granite Rapids, so it remains to be seen there if the P-core Diamond Rapids will be as Xeon 6+ too or as Xeon 7. But Diamond Rapids in any case seems to be much further out than even Clearwater Forest, which will only begin shipping next year.

Taking many off-guard at Intel Tech Tour was Intel promoting Clearwater Forest as offering “2x more cores” than Sierra Forest… Well, yes, with up to 288 cores for Clearwater Forest is twice as many as the flagship Xeon 6780E processor of the Xeon 6700E series with 144 cores.

But there was also the Xeon 6900E series with up to 288 cores… Granted, the 288 cores Sierra Forest processors were rare and apparently available via some Chinese CSPs, but not broadly available. Due to the Xeon 6900E being rare, Intel compared Xeon 6+ against the Xeon 6700E series and ignored the Xeon 6900E series for the entire presentation without any mentions. So in that regard, it’s twice as many cores possible but otherwise the same top core count as the Xeon 6900E series.

Besides offering “2x” the cores, Xeon 6+ also is promoted for providing 1.9x higher memory bandwidth. This higher memory bandwidth comes from now supporting DDR5-8000 MT/s memory, up from DDR5-6400 with Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processors. Plus Xeon 6+ will support 12 channel memory rather than eight channels with the Xeon 6700E processors (but again, the rare Xeon 6900E series can handle 12 memory channels too). MRDIMMs are not supported. Also helping out with Clearwater Forest performance is up to 575MB of LLC cache, the 18A manufacturing, and a new Clearwater Forest feature of Intel AET. AET is for Application Energy Telemetry to help developers/administrators profile and scale their workloads across these high core count processors. Intel AET sounds more like just a profiling/debug feature, so I asked later on if it was simply a software feature. Apparently a “tiny amount” of silicon is needed for Intel AET functionality.

The performance numbers around Xeon 6+ were extremely limited nor were any SKU tables provided. Intel at this time is just talking up Clearwater Forest as having +17% IPC per core. While Intel 18A is used for the CPU cores, there is also Intel 3 and Intel 7 manufacturing for the other tiles.

Intel Xeon 6+ was also promoted as up to 23% improvement in efficiency across the load line. Again though lack of clarity into the specific comparison and will be more interesting once we get hands on with Xeon 6+ for independent power and performance benchmarking at Phoronix.

There is also a slide promoting Intel Xeon 6+ as having “1.9x higher performance” against the Xeon 6780E processor. This positioning is a bit odd considering the 2x core count, more memory channels and higher memory speed, larger LLC, etc. So to be less than 2x is unusual especially given the core counts… This comparison was widely panned at the event. Hopefully Intel will put out more concrete comparison numbers soon as well as any Xeon 6+ SKU table for getting an accurate idea of the comparison to the Xeon 6700E series.

Update: One day before the embargo lift, Intel got back with a follow-up about the performance… Given the questions raised at the event over their comparison, they provided an additional slide and commentary around the Xeon 6980E 288-core performance vs. Clearwater Forest 288-core:

“[NEW] Sierra Forest 288c/500W vs 288c/450W Clearwater Forest (Pre-Product Projection)

Based on 1-socket projections comparing equivalent core count processors, we’re projecting up to 1.17x higher performance when moving to Clearwater Forest using 10% less TDP.

Additionally, the net result that we’re projecting is up to a 1.3x higher performance per-watt when comparing Intel Xeon 6+ to the equivalent core count Intel Xeon 69xxE (codename Sierra Forest).

While we’ll have more performance benchmarks and metrics as we get closer to launch, the positive performance uplifts are due in part to a number of factors including leveraging an advanced manufacturing node (Intel 18A) and higher memory bandwidth support (DDR5 8000 vs DDR5 6400 with Sierra Forest).”

And the new slide:

Intel did confirm Xeon 6+ will feature max TDPs in the 300 to 500 Watt space and single and dual socket compatibility. There is also up to six UPI 2.0 links and up to 96 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and up to 64 lanes for CXL 2.0. Intel QuickAssist/QAT, DLB, DSA, and IAA accelerators are still supported with Xeon 6+ but Intel hadn’t really talked about their accelerator blocks at all during the event.

Frankly, this event was rather a letdown. No real-world performance numbers shared, Intel completely omitted from their original presentation their limited Xeon 6900E series that carry up to the same 288 E-core capacity, and all-around the power/performance details were light. No competitive comparisons either against the existing AMD EPYC 9005 Turin (Dense) processors and that will only become more competitive next year with AMD EPYC Venice. Plus no Xeon 6+ SKU table nor any word on the Xeon 6+ processor availability and pricing. At least with Intel Panther Lake they confirmed review sampling after CES 2026 but with Clearwater Forest we simply have an expectation for now of H1’2026.

Hopefully we learn more soon and that it hopefully won’t be too long before seeing Intel Xeon 6+ in our lab for being able to deliver independent power and performance benchmarks for seeing in-depth how it stacks up compared to prior generation Sierra Forest and the AMD EPYC competition.