Clearwater Forest Reaches Mass Production on 18A
Intel has confirmed that its Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest data center CPUs have entered full mass production, marking a major milestone for the company’s 18A process technology. While 18A will also power future client chips such as Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 and Wildcat Lake Core Series 3, Clearwater Forest is squarely aimed at data center and edge infrastructure, including 6G and edge AI workloads. Intel is positioning this family as a key step in its server roadmap, signaling renewed execution after several challenging generations in the data center CPU market. The company’s oneAPI Toolkit 2026.0 release already offers full support for Clearwater Forest, allowing developers to prepare software stacks ahead of launch. With general availability expected later this year, enterprise and cloud customers are watching closely to see how Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest reshapes the competitive landscape for high-density, energy-efficient Intel server processors.
288 Darkmont E-Cores and Massive On-Package Cache
At the heart of Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest is Intel’s new Darkmont E-core architecture, designed for highly parallel, efficiency-focused workloads. A single Clearwater Forest CPU integrates up to 288 E-cores, organized across 12 compute chiplets. To keep that many cores fed, Intel has equipped the package with 576 MB of L3 cache and 288 MB of L2 cache, a substantial increase in on-chip memory compared with previous E-core-based server designs. The platform scales to a 450W TDP and uses the LGA 7529 socket in both single- and dual-socket configurations, targeting dense, scalable data center deployments. Memory support extends to 12-channel DDR5 at up to 8000 MT/s, while I/O includes up to six UPI 2.0 links at 24 GT/s per lane, 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and 64 CXL 2.0 lanes. Together, these specifications highlight Clearwater Forest as a data center CPU built for bandwidth and concurrency.
18A, Advanced Packaging, and oneAPI Support
Clearwater Forest is one of Intel’s first major data center CPU families to leverage the company’s 18A process technology, combining several cutting-edge innovations. Intel highlights the use of RibbonFET transistors and PowerVia backside power delivery, which aim to improve power efficiency and performance scaling at advanced nodes. On the packaging side, Clearwater Forest integrates Foveros Direct 3D stacking and EMIB 2.5D interconnects, enabling a multi-chiplet design that ties together compute, cache, and I/O with high bandwidth and low latency. To help customers exploit these hardware features, Intel’s oneAPI 2026.0 toolkit offers a unified programming model spanning Xeon, Core Ultra, Arc GPUs, and future accelerators. This allows developers to optimize code once and deploy across a broad range of Intel platforms, including upcoming families such as Crescent Island, Nova Lake, and Diamond Rapids, streamlining the transition to Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest in heterogeneous data center environments.
Performance and Efficiency Gains for Data Center Operators
Early testing gives a glimpse of what Clearwater Forest can deliver in real-world deployments. In evaluations conducted by Ericsson, a single Xeon 6990E+ Clearwater Forest chip with 288 Darkmont E-cores demonstrated a 38% reduction in runtime rack power compared with a dual-socket Xeon 6780E Sierra Forest platform that also totals 288 cores. Beyond power savings, Ericsson measured more than 60% higher performance per watt and 30% greater overall performance for Clearwater Forest in the tested workloads. These gains align with the design goal of Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest: maximize throughput and efficiency for highly parallel, cloud-native, and telecom applications. For data center operators facing rising energy costs and capacity constraints, such improvements could translate directly into lower operational expenses, higher rack density, and better service-level guarantees, particularly in environments where scaling out with many cores is more important than maximizing single-thread performance.
Positioning Against AMD and the Road to Diamond Rapids
Clearwater Forest’s move to full production is strategically important as Intel seeks to regain momentum against competing data center CPU offerings, including high-core-count alternatives from other vendors. By delivering 288 E-cores per socket with modern I/O and memory bandwidth, Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest strengthens Intel’s story in dense, energy-efficient compute nodes for cloud and telecom workloads. At the same time, Intel is preparing its next generation of P-core server CPUs, Diamond Rapids, which is expected to offer 256 cores per socket initially and up to 512 cores in denser variants with 16-channel memory. Dell has already announced its PowerEdge R9810 2U server platform built around Diamond Rapids, promising doubled memory bandwidth, larger cache, and up to a 50% increase in core count compared with previous generations. In this context, Clearwater Forest acts as the E-core pillar of Intel’s data center strategy, complementing future P-core platforms in a diversified Xeon 6 lineup.