Intel’s upcoming all-E-core Xeon parts pack in 288 Skymont-based cores and up to 3TB of RAM.
Unfortunately, we aren’t on the ground at Hot Chips 2025—unfortunate, because Intel dumped a whole bunch of details about its upcoming Clearwater Forest high-core-count Xeons at the conference. Here’s the key metrics: up to 288 Skymont-based CPU cores on a single package, fabricated on Intel’s 18A process, and connected to twelve channels of DDR5 memory at up to 8000 MT/s.
There’s a lot to talk about here, and we’re going to cover it quickly, so pay attention. Clearwater Forest is the successor to Sierra Forest. It’s built using twelve CPU chiplets, each with eight clusters of four CPU cores. These are based on the same fundamental core architecture found in Intel’s Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors, serving as the E-cores in those chips. There’s some discussion over whether Darkmont is simply the name of Skymont on 18A; that would line up considering Panther Lake, also expected to be built on 18A, will purportedly also use Darkmont e-cores.
