Intel held a launch event Monday of a number of new chips, including the midrange Xeon 6700P and 6500P server processors, and announced that the 288-core Xeon 6900E (Sierra Forrest-AP) server processor it introduced last year would not be “widely deployed” by OEMs because its primary customers are cloud computing users with customized chip needs, CRN reports.
Intel added that the Xeon 6900E, the flagship of the Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processor family with energy-efficient cores (E-cores), is currently in production. Ronak Singhal, a senior fellow at Intel and chief architect of Xeon chips, said that the Xeon 6900E is designed to meet the needs of cloud customers for custom chips. According to him, one of the major customers has already launched systems based on the Xeon 6900E. The company had previously announced that it would be making custom Xeon 6 and AI accelerators for AWS.
Image Source: Intel
According to an Intel executive, those who really need a lot more cores in their processors are typically the kind of customers the company typically works with on custom solutions. A few weeks earlier, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel’s interim CEO and CEO of Intel Products, said during a quarterly earnings call that the Xeon 6 E-core lineup wasn’t getting the traction it had hoped for, also noting that it was a niche product.
Image Source: Intel
While the Xeon 6 E-core family hasn’t lived up to expectations, Holthouse said Intel still has high hopes for the next-generation Clearwater Forest E-core Xeon processors, even though they’ve been delayed until the first half of 2026 due to packaging technology issues, compared to a 2025 release.
Clearwater Forest is seen as a strategic product by the company because it will be the first server processor to use Intel’s 18A process, which the company has repeatedly said will allow it to outperform chips made by TSMC and Samsung. Months before Gelsinger left the company, he said the chip would allow Intel to “accelerate share gains” in the market.