Intel has officially launched the Xeon 6+ CPU product line for data centers, Edge compute, and telecoms.

At the Computex event in Taiwan, attended by DCD, the company provided further details about the chip family, previously codenamed Clearwater Forest. The Xeon 6+ is the first data center CPU to be built on Intel 18A, its foundry business's most advanced process node.

The 6+ CPU features up to 288 E-cores, supports 1-2 sockets, and has a max TDP per CPU of 450W. The chip line has 12 memory channels, with 8000MT/s DDR5, as well as 96 lanes of PCIe/64 lanes of CXL. It has 576MB of last level cache.

Intel Xeon 6990E+ delivers 1.3x higher average performance per thread and 1.3x higher average performance/thread/watt vs AMD's Epyc 9965, the company claimed.

The new CPU processors will be supported by major server manufacturers, including Amax, ASRock, ASUS, Dell, Foxconn, Giga Computing, Gigabyte, HPE, Inventec, Lenovo, Mitac, MSI, Pegatron, QCT, and Supermicro.

“We are seeing this significant demand for more and more CPUs,” Kevork Kechichian, EVP & GM of Intel’s Data Center Group, said in a press conference.

“Forget AI for a moment, if that's possible - everything that we used to do, maybe five years ago, on enterprise, on servers, whether it's 5G networks, whether databases, apps, cloud-based applications. All of that is still here today, but what's happening with the agent, is that it’s suddenly coming to the forefront, right? So we'll see orders of magnitude more users that are not necessarily humans.”

Dr. Magnus Ewerbring, CTO for APAC at Ericsson, added: “We have a 10-year outlook saying that the traffic from devices to the network will increase 10 to 15 times, and that's an enormous challenge for operators to do.

“The compute needs to be efficient and predictable, and therefore we're very happy now with our partnership with the Xeon 6+, and making sure it's tightly knitted in with our application, and to be able to deliver that over a long time.”

Intel claimed that tests in a live deployment showed that Ericsson should see a 30 percent performance increase at the same core count, 60 percent greater performance per watt, and a 38 percent reduction in runtime rack power.