Intel’s upcoming Clearwater Forest processors will be the chipmaker’s first Xeon products to leverage Foveros 3D stacking. According to Bionic_Squash, these cloud-centric data center processors will leverage 3D stacking with hybrid bonding to place multiple compute dies on top of the base tile. Clearwater Forest will feature up to 288 E-cores based on the Darkmont architecture.
Sierra Forest will be the first high-compute Xeon product, leveraging up to 144 E-cores based on the Sierra Glen architecture. Sierra Glen and Darkmont are cloud-optimized variants of the Crestmont and Skymont cores.
The Xeon Clearwater Forest CPUs will leverage Foveros Direct, an advanced version of the 3D packaging technology that focuses on high bandwidth to feed the numerous E-cores while keeping the latency and power within acceptable limits. It utilizes high-density interconnect bumps to connect relatively similar (and uniform) sets of dies.
Intel’s Sierra Forest chips will launch later this year alongside Granite Rapids-SP. Clearwater Forest is the last data center product on the company’s immediate roadmap, so expect a mid-to-late 2025 launch.
Further reading on Sierra and Clearwater Forest:
