Clearwater Forest Grows Intel’s Xeon Core Count to 288

Discover how Intel’s Clearwater Forest Xeon 6+ targets datacenter efficiency and rivals AMD and Arm-based processors ahead of its 2026 launch.

Clearwater Forest, the most recent entry in Intel’s Xeon product portfolio, is the efficiency-oriented successor to Sierra Forest, which was Intel’s response to the rise of massively multi-core Arm-powered CPUs for datacenters: on the merchant market, this is represented by Ampere’s Altra and AmpereOne series, while hyperscale cloud platform operators spin custom silicon, including AWS Graviton, Microsoft Cobalt, and Google Axion. AMD’s fifth-generation EPYC (“Turin Dense”) CPUs are the x86-64 counterpart to Intel’s Forest-named Xeon portfolio, which also vies for market share against the Arm Neoverse-derived hyperscale custom silicon. Intel markets Clearwater Forest as Xeon 6+ and is expected to be in sales channels by early 2026.