The Hot Chips conference, held annually at Stanford University, showcased Intel’s latest innovation: the Clearwater Forest, an advanced Xeon processor designed for enhanced efficiency and performance. This processor, scheduled for release in 2026, marks a significant milestone as it is the first Xeon chip to utilize Intel’s cutting-edge 18A process node.
Clearwater Forest boasts an impressive array of 288 efficiency cores, doubling the core count of its predecessor, the Sierra Forest, which features 144 cores. This shift towards a dual-core architecture—comprising efficiency cores (E-cores) for less demanding tasks and performance cores (P-cores) for more power-hungry applications—reflects Intel’s evolving strategy in CPU design.
The E-cores in Clearwater Forest are tailored for tasks like multitasking and AI inferencing, demonstrating a clear focus on enhancing performance in multithreaded applications. Each group of four E-cores shares a 4MB L2 cache, resulting in a doubled L2 bandwidth compared to previous designs.
Intel has also made substantial improvements to the chip’s power subsystems, focusing on maximizing density and enhancing signaling efficiency. Coupled with the advanced 18A process, these enhancements could help Intel regain competitive advantages against AMD, which has gained a reputation for efficiency in recent years.
The Clearwater Forest chip will support impressive system specifications, including 24 lanes of DDR5 memory and extensive PCIe Gen 5 lanes, aiming for a total of 576 cores with a combined cache of 1152 MB, capable of delivering TFLOP-level performance.
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