Intel's "Clearwater Forest" Xeon 7 E-Core CPU Will Be a Beast

Summary

With AMD having attaining more than 40 percent revenue share and more than 27 percent shipment share in the X86 server CPU market in the first half of 2025, that means two things. First, AMD is selling some big, fat X86 CPUs compared to Intel. It also means that Intel, despite all of its many woes, is getting nearly 60 percent of revenues and north of 72 percent of shipments for X86 server CPU here in 2025. No, that is not the share Intel is used to, but that’s life sometimes. And with the rollout of its “Clearwater Rapids” Xeon 7 P-core processor and the Xeon 7 “Clearwater Forest” E-core processors in 2026, everything hinges on the Intel 18A manufacturing process (what might otherwise be called 1.8 nanometers) as well as its 2.5D EMIB interposer and Foveros 3D chip stacking and bonding technologies, both of which saw their initial use in the datacenter on the ill-fated and much-delayed “Ponte Vecchio” Xe Max Series GPU accelerator. To say that a lot is hanging on these two Xeon 7 processors is an understatement. With the hyperscalers and cloud builders ramping up the use of their homegrown Arm server CPUs, every X86 server socket in the datacenter is in contention, and AMD is a fierce competitor that has been metronomic in its regularity of Epyc server CPU launched and dominant because of the ability of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp to leapfrog over Intel Foundry’s processes and packaging. But with 18A and the Xeon 7 next year, there is a chance for Intel to hold back the tide a little and perhaps reach an equilibrium with X86 server CPUs. While the E-core variants of energy-efficient, throughput processors are somewhat niche in their adoption, that is a good thing inasmuch as they will help Intel with ramping the 18A process as well as the 2.5D and 3D packaging techniques that are also expected with the P-core variants of the Xeon 7. Those packaging challenges were enough for Intel to never promise Diamond Rapids for 2025 and for it to push out Clearwate...