Intel Confirms Next-Gen Diamond Rapids & Clearwater Forest Xeon CPUs Are Releasing Next Year; Team Blue Ready For a Comeback In The Data Center Market
Intel plans to aggressively expand its data center offerings with next-gen Xeon CPUs, and Diamond Rapids and Clearwater Forest are now confirmed to be released in 2026.
Intel’s Data Center CPU Offerings Are Expected To Become a Lot More Aggressive With Diamond Rapids & Clearwater Forest
For the past few years, Team Blue has dominated the workstation CPU segment with its Xeon offerings, but after the AI trend, Intel started to lose ground in the segment, mainly since competitors like AMD expanded their presence through more capable EPYC offerings. This led to a noticeable drop in market share, where Intel lost its crown, with Team Red getting the higher share. However, moving into the future, Team Blue has revealed intentions to regain dominance, especially with their next-gen Xeon CPUs, which are said to offer tremendous performance.
So obviously customers are deploying Granite Rapids right now, which is a good step function, then we’ve got Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids which is our E core and P core product lines coming in ’26 and so I think we’ll stem the tide and then we’ll start to see market segment share start to build back up.
We weren’t very certain about the debut of Diamond Rapids, given that details around it were pretty confined, but with Intel’s Products CEO officially confirming the lineup’s release in 2026, we now know that the CPUs will drop for certain. Based on past rumors around Diamond Rapids, we know that it will feature the massive LGA 9324 socket, almost 5 times bigger than the LGA 1700, and will come with Panther Cove-X P-Cores, making it one of the fastest Xeon offerings by the company. Interestingly, we recently saw the LGA 9324 socket surfacing up on the Chinese platform Goofish, revealing that production is definitely in the latter stages.
🙈 tG-#22>lD pic.twitter.com/SfGDoFa19s
— HXL (@9550pro) May 27, 2025
Details around the core count or specifications of Diamond Rapids are unclear for now. However, it is rumored that Intel will employ 18A for them, and achieving High-Volume Manufacturing (HVM) won’t be a problem at all. Intel is expected to position Diamond Rapids against AMD’s EPYC Venice CPUs, which will employ TSMC’s 2nm process and are said to be one of Team Red’s highly capable EPYC offerings. The competition in the data center CPU segment is going to heat up.
For Clearwater Forest, Intel expects to employ the Darkmont Core architecture, bringing in up to 288 E-Cores. The lineup will also utilize the Foveros Direct hybrid bonding technology and will be based on Intel’s 18A process, as Team Blue plans to rely on native resources for this series altogether. Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids are expected to frame Intel’s next-gen data center portfolio, and we are anticipating positive results in terms of market adoption.
