Now that it's 2024, Intel's "five nodes in four years" strategy will start picking up steam. The company has multiple CPUs on new processes lined up for launch this year for client and server. Now that the company is moving to tile-based CPUs, it will also begin applying its latest packing technologies to these chips. Case in point: 2025's Clearwater Forest Xeon chips, its second-generation E-core data center CPUs, are now being reported as utilizing Intel's latest 3D-stacking technology. This will make it an interesting and ambitious design for the company as it faces off against AMD in the high-density data center CPU arena.
Backing up one step, Intel is expected to launch its first-generation efficiency Xeon CPU in 2024, which is named Sierra Forest. That chip will be made on its Intel 3 process and feature 144 cores, though Pat Gelsinger also showed off a dual-tile version last year with 288 cores. Its successor will be named Clearwater Forest, and it will be made on the Intel 18A process. It will also feature 288 cores but on a smaller node. Wccftech has flagged a Twitter source claiming that Clearwater Forest will feature Intel's Foveros Direct packaging, the company's most advanced 3D-stacking technology. Just to back up one more time, Intel's Foveros connection technology has two flavors: Omni, for omnidirectional, and Direct, for hybrid copper-to-copper bonding.
Clearwater Forest is expected to feature a base tile that rests on top of an interposer, with the tiles containing the CPU cores sitting on top of that. Foveros Direct uses copper-to-copper bonding for high-speed interconnects and low resistance and is the company's fourth-generation design. Foveros Direct can also be mixed and matched with Foveros Omni and Intel's embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB) for the chip in question, giving the company newfound flexibility in advanced packaging.
Although Intel still dominates in the data center, it's been slowly losing market share to AMD's Epyc chips over the years, and it hopes to halt that progress in 2024 with CPUs like Sierra Forest and then Clearwater Forest next year. At the same time, it's also upping the ante with its "Rapids" Xeon CPUs with P-cores. It launched its fifth-generation Emerald Rapids CPUs in December and will follow up with sixth-generation Granite Rapids sometime this year. AMD will also launch its Zen 5-based Epyc platform this year, making 2024 a year of stiff competition for data center dominance.
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