Sierra Forest with 288 cores hits the stage

Published in PC Hardware

Sierra Forest with 288 cores hits the stage

by Fuad Abazovic on28 September 2023

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Dual socket 576 E-cores

Intel surprised the audience at the Innovation 2023 event, showing a new Sierra Forest data center processor with a twist. Intel has previously announced that the Sierra Forest has up to 144 Efficiency cores. Still, Gelsinger surprised the audience by showing the two tiles on the same package, resulting in a 288-core CPU.

A dual-socket server board demonstrated on stage, brought the total core number to 576 cores. This is a surprising turn of events shadowing AMD’s recently announced Sienna with 64 Zen 4c efficiency cores.

Sandra Rivera and Pat Gelsinger repeatedly said that Sierra Forest is coming in 2024, shortly after Emerald Rapids. Emeral will be known as the fifth generation Xeon and will launch on December 14 with consumer Meteor Lake Core Ultra.

Gelsinger showed a 288-core Sierra Forest part. It has two compute dies packed with E-Cores and will put much pressure on the Sienna 64-core SKU. Even with a socket design, AMD ends up having a 128-core solution, while Intel, in a dual socket environment, ends up having a whopping 576 cores. The 576 cores look like a record, at least in the X86 world.

Intel’s data center is showing great signs of recovery with Fifth generation Xeon scheduled to launch on December 14 together with Meteor Lake Core Ultra.

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