The semiconductor giant discloses that its 288-core Xeon 6900E server CPU won’t be ‘broadly deployed’ through OEMs and will instead be targeted at cloud customers with custom chip needs after the Intel Products CEO called the product segment a ‘niche market.’
Intel said it doesn’t plan to “broadly” deploy its 288-core Xeon 6900E server CPU, which it is instead targeting at cloud customers with custom chip needs.
The semiconductor giant spent Monday promoting the launch of new Xeon 6 processors with performance cores—namely the midrange Xeon 6700P and 6500P series—expanding beyond the high-end Xeon 6900P series with up to 128 cores that debuted last year.
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However, Intel indicated it wouldn’t spend much time talking about the Xeon 6900E, which it said is now in production and was meant to be the flagship of the company’s new Xeon 6 processors with efficient cores (E-cores), code-named Sierra Forest.
In an Intel briefing last week that was mostly focused on new Xeon 6 CPUs for mainstream data centers as well as networking and edge applications, Ronak Singhal, senior fellow and chief architect of Xeon products, said the Xeon 6900E is designed to meet the custom chip needs of cloud customers, including a large one that has it deployed now.
“When they’re ready to talk about what they’re doing there, I think it’ll be pretty interesting,” he said.
Unlike other Xeon 6 product segments, however, the Xeon 6900E won’t be “broadly deployed through all our OEMs and so forth,” Singhal said in an interview with CRN Friday.
“It’s something we’re really working on a custom basis with targeted customers because the kinds of customers that really want that that much higher core count—we go up to 288 cores—tends to be the type of customers that we usually work with on custom solutions,” he said. “So that’s why you don’t see it as a big SKU stack and all of that.”
“It’s really around, this customer needs these characteristics, and we’ll work with them to build what they want,” Singhal added.
Intel Products CEO Recently Called E-Core Xeons A ‘Niche Market’
Intel’s new Xeon 6900E disclosure came nearly four weeks after Michelle Johnston Holthaus, interim Intel co-CEO and Intel Products CEO, said on the company’s earnings call that its Xeon 6 lineup with E-cores is not getting the traction it had hoped for.
“What we’ve seen is that’s more of a niche market, and we haven’t seen volume materialize there as fast as we expected,” she said.
The chipmaker debuted the E-core Xeon CPUs last year with the Xeon 6700E series, which scales up to 144 cores. The Xeon 6 family marked the first time the company bifurcated its server CPUs between two performance types: the traditional P-cores for a broad swath of data center applications and E-cores for cloud-native and telecom workloads.
The chips have been viewed as Intel’s response to the high-density, energy-efficient custom Arm-based processors that are allowing Intel’s largest cloud customers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—to lower their reliance on the company.
Despite the product segment not meeting expectations so far, Holthaus indicated Intel still has high hopes for its next-generation Xeon CPUs with E-cores, code-named Clearwater Forest, even though the company had to delay their release to the first half of 2026 from the original 2025 timeframe it had given.
Clearwater Forest has been seen as a strategically important product in large part because of how it will be the first server CPU to use the Intel 18A node, which the company has repeatedly said will allow it to surpass the advanced chip-making capabilities of TSMC and Samsung. Several months before Gelsinger abruptly left the company as CEO, he said the product would allow Intel to “accelerate share gains.”
“It does have some complicated packaging expectations that moved it to 2026, but we expect that to be a good product and continue to close the gap as well. But this is going to be a journey. It’s not a destination,” Holthaus said on the earnings call.
