Intel Xeon 6+ & Intel Ethernet E835 Launch
Last year at Tech Tour Arizona, Intel announced Clearwater Forest as the Xeon 6+ series. Details were rather light then while for Computex, Intel is announcing that Xeon 6+ is now "launching" beginning tomorrow, 1 June. In addition to Xeon 6+, the new Intel Ethernet E835 is also launching while there are updates on Crescent Island and Diamond Rapids.
Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest is Intel's new E-core server platform succeeding Sierra Forest and built upon Intel 18A. While said to be launching 1 June, unlike previous Xeon launches, we still haven't seen any hardware in the lab for review. This is currently not clear how widespread Xeon 6+ availability will be in the industry or if/when we send up seeing any Xeon 6+ review hardware.
As previously outlined by Intel, Xeon 6+ features up to 288 E-cores and supports up to DDR5-8000 memory.
Being based on the E core design, these Xeon 6+ CPUs are designed for storage, databases, network infrastructure, media, and web and microservices. With lacking AVX-512 and the higher per-core performance of P-core server CPUs like Granite Rapids, Clearwater Forest isn't focused as much on AI and HPC scenarios.
The Darkmont E cores should provide much better performance and with the Xeon 6900 E-core Sierra Forest parts having been extremely rare, ultimately Xeon 6+ is a big upgrade over the prior Sierra Forest benchmarks. Plus with Xeon 6+ is 12 channel memory compared to 8 channel memory and at DDR5-8000 rather than DDR5-6400, 96 lanes of PCIe versus 88 lanes, and up to 576MB total LLC. Too bad no ability to benchmark these new CPUs yet but hopefully that will change soon for being able to independently investigate the performance of Clearwater Forest under a variety of benchmarks.
Intel also is using Computex for announcing the Ethernet E835. Intel E835 controllers and network adapters offer up to 200 GbE connectivity, RDMA support, and other typical features of high-end networking gear.
👁 Intel Ethernet E835 features
Today's Computex briefing reaffirmed plans for shipping the next-gen "Diamond Rapids" P-core server processors in 2027.
👁 Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids in 2027
Intel also used Computex to again highlight their upcoming Crescent Island AI accelerator. This Xe3P data center GPU is now advertised as offering up to a 480GB memory capacity using LPDDR5X memory and will be power optimized for a 350 Watt air-cooled PCIe configuration.
As usual, the upcoming Crescent Island accelerator will be backed by Intel's open-source and upstream software stack on Linux -- as we have covered in many articles already around the ongoing Crescent Island driver enablement work for the Linux kernel and related components.
👁 Intel Crescent Island software stack
That's all for now, more when finally having the new hardware like Intel Xeon 6+ processors in the lab for Linux testing and benchmarking.
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