Intel officially launches Xeon 6+ 'Clearwater Forest' CPUs, up to 288 cores, built on Intel 18A

Intel has officially launched its Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" processor family at Computex 2026, and it's a landmark moment for the company. These are Intel's first data center CPUs with compute tiles built on the Intel 18A process node, putting the current-gen node firmly in production and shipping through enterprise server vendors on day one.

The lineup spans four SKUs across six configurations, starting at 144 cores with the Xeon 6960E+ and topping out at 288 cores on the flagship Xeon 6990E+. All models support single- and dual-socket configurations, with dual-socket setups pushing the total core count to 576. Every SKU comes with support for 12-channel DDR5-8000 memory, 96 PCIe Gen 5 lanes, 64 CXL 2.0 lanes, six UPI 2.0 links, and Intel's new Application Energy Telemetry (AET). TDPs range from 300W to 450W across the lineup.

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Architecturally, Clearwater Forest is one of Intel's most complex chiplet designs to date. Each package stacks 12 compute tiles on Intel 18A, each carrying 24 Darkmont E-cores, for a total of 288 cores per socket. These sit atop three active base tiles on Intel 3 and two I/O tiles on Intel 7, all connected using Foveros Direct 3D and EMIB packaging. The result is 576 MB of L3 cache alongside 288 MB of L2 cache.

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Intel is targeting cloud-native, telecom, and agentic AI workloads with this part, and the core count makes a compelling argument on paper. For its first-party competitive data, Intel compares the Xeon 6990E+ directly against AMD's 192-core EPYC 9965, claiming 30% better average performance per thread and up to 30% superior power efficiency. Intel also claims up to 2.5x performance over its prior-generation Sierra Forest chips and up to 9:1 server consolidation versus 2nd Gen Xeon platforms.

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On the security side, Intel SGX and Intel TDX are baked into silicon, covering confidential and multi-tenant workloads. Platform compatibility carries over from existing Xeon 69xxE/P infrastructure, which should ease adoption for OEM partners. Intel has also confirmed that its oneAPI 2026.0 toolkit ships with full Clearwater Forest support out of the box, making software migration easier for existing Xeon customers. Clearwater Forest systems are available today through ASUS, Dell, Ericsson, GIGABYTE, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro.

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With AMD's EPYC Venice on Zen 6 targeting a second-half 2026 release and NVIDIA's Vera CPU already benchmarking ahead of both x86 incumbents in some tests, Intel needed a strong showing. It looks like Clearwater Forest, at least on paper, is exactly that.