Intel's next-gen Clearwater Forest Xeon CPU unveiled: 288 cores, made in the USA on 18A node

Intel has provided us with some rather exciting news at the Hot Chips 2025 event, with details on its next-gen Clearwater Forest Xeon CPUs: up to 288 cores, made on Intel's in-house 18A process node and on American soil, with Foveros Direct 3D construction.

4

The new Intel Clearwater Forest Xeon CPUs will have only Efficient cores (E-Cores) and no Performance cores (P-Cores) with up to 288 cores, with the company moving the package on its next-gen Clearwater Forest Xeon processors into chiplets, with 12 compute chiplets fabbed on Intel 18A, above three base tiles fabbed on Intel 3, and two IO chiplets on Intel 7.

Intel then links this all through its in-house Foveros Direct 3D stacking and EMIB technologies, with a monolithic mesh fabric that connects resources across the package. Clearwater Forest Xeon CPUs are designed and fully built in the US, versus processors being fabbed at TSMC in Taiwan, marking a huge milestone for Intel.

4

The next-gen Clearwater Forest Xeon CPUs move over to the new Darkmont CPU architecture for its E-Cores, with leaks on Clearwater Forest suggesting 288 cores, Intel has now confirmed it does indeed have 288 cores on Clearwater Forest. The company has grouped four cores around a unified 4MB L2 cache with an estimated 17 cycle latency, with Intel promising a 17% IPC performance improvement over its previous-gen E-Core architecture, Sierra Forest, and double the L2 bandwidth to around 400GB/sec.

Intel has also confirmed that its Xeon 9600E platform is compatible with the new Clearwater Forest Xeon GPUs, with the launch of the new Xeon CPUs expected to happen in the next few months, but nothing has been made clear yet, once this changes we'll be sure to report on it.