Chipzilla has been telling the world+dog about its new chip release schedule which has been reviewed after prior delays. 

Sierra Forest will use only E-cores to achieve higher core counts to compete with AMD's Epyc server processors codenamed Bergamo which features up to 128 smaller Zen 4c cores.

The Gracemont E-cores featured in Sierra Forest processors only contain one thread for each core. The purpose of the Sierra Forest architecture design is to achieve ultra-high core counts for greater compute density that would benefit cloud and HPC server applications.

Intel Data Centre and AI Group head Sandra Rivera said that it had been a challenging few years as her team had to stuff a lot of new innovation and complexity into the new chips. This caused Intel’s product release dates to be pushed out.

It is not like there is any rush, Intel still dominates the markets for PC and server processing chips, and has a market share greater than 70 per cent. But while that sounds great, Intel used to have 90 per cent of the market in 2017.

Intel's most powerful fourth-generation Xeon processor for data centres, Sapphire Rapids, had faced delays that gave competitor Advanced Micro Devices time to catch up.

Rivera said Intel's "roadmap is on track" and was "hitting all of our key engineering milestones." Although, if it were hitting milestones surely it would be off track? After all, you don’t stick milestones in the middle of the road that would be silly.