Intel Releases Xeon 6 Plus, a Faster and More Efficient CPU for Data Centres

The semiconductor company Intel has released its new line of server processors, the Xeon 6 Plus. The chip was unveiled at the Computex 2026 technology exhibition held in Taiwan.

This processor is not intended for personal devices but is designed to power data centres, edge computing, and telecommunications networks. The Intel Xeon 6 Plus was previously known by the code name Clearwater Forest.

This processor is Intel’s first data centre CPU to be produced using Intel 18A fabrication technology, which is currently the American company’s most advanced manufacturing node. The Xeon 6 Plus CPU features up to 288 power-efficient cores (E-cores), supports single or dual processor socket configurations, and has a maximum thermal design power (T/DP) of up to 450 watts per chip.

To support large-scale workloads, the processor is equipped with 12 channels of DDR5 memory with speeds up to 8,000 MT/s, support for 96 PCIe lanes and 64 CXL lanes, and a 576 MB last-level cache. According to Intel, the Xeon 6 Plus will be utilised by various server manufacturers, including Amax, ASRock, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Gigabyte, HPE, Lenovo, MSI, Supermicro, and QCT.

Kevork Kechichian, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Data Centre Group, stated that the demand for server processors continues to rise, even beyond artificial intelligence (AI) trends. According to Kechichian, various services such as databases, enterprise applications, cloud computing, and 5G networks are still expanding and require increasingly large computing capacities.

“Everything we used five years ago, from 5G networks, databases, and enterprise applications to cloud services, is still in use today. However, the emergence of AI agents is significantly increasing the number of system users, and not all of them are humans,” said Kechichian.

Magnus Ewerbring, CTO of Ericsson for Asia Pacific, also noted that network data traffic is estimated to increase by 10 to 15 times over the next decade. Intel claims that real-world testing of the Xeon 6 Plus in Ericsson systems demonstrated a performance increase of up to 30 per cent with the same number of cores. Furthermore, the processor is claimed to deliver 60 per cent better power efficiency and reduce server rack power consumption by up to 38 per cent compared to the previous generation.