Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel Corporation, has outlined future performance expectations for the company's Core range of processors. In a recent fourth quarter 2023 earnings call he declared: "The Core Ultra platform delivers leadership AI performance today with our next-generation platforms launching later this year, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake tripling our AI performance. In 2025 with Panther Lake, we will grow AI performance up to an additional 2x." Team Blue's Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" mobile processors arrived right at the tail end of last year, as a somewhat delayed answer to AMD's Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" APU series—both leveraging their own AI-crunching NPU technologies. Gelsinger believes that the launch of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Core product lines will bring significant (3x) AI processing improvements over Meteor Lake. He seemed to confident in a delay-free release schedule for the new year and beyond: "We are first in the industry to have incorporated both gate-all-around and backside power delivery in a single process node, the latter unexpected two years ahead of our competition. Arrow Lake, our lead Intel 20A vehicle will launch this year."

He proceeded to gush about their next node advancement: "Intel 18A is expected to achieve manufacturing readiness in second half 2024, completing our five nodes in four year journey and bringing us back to process leadership. I am pleased to say that Clearwater Forest, our first Intel 18A part for servers has already gone into fab and Panther Lake for clients will be heading into Fab shortly." Industry experts posit that Core "Panther Lake" parts could borrow elements from the next generation Xeon "Clearwater Forest" efficiency-focused family—possibly the latter's "Darkmont" E-cores, to accompany "Cougar Cove" P-cores. The Intel CEO is quite excited about the manufacturing outlay for 2025: "I'll just say, hey, we look at this every single day and we're scrutinizing carefully our progress on 18A. And obviously the great news that we just described those Clearwater Forest taping out, that gives us a lot of confidence that 18A is healthy. That's a major product for us. Panther Lake following that shortly."

Intel presented its next generation Xeon "Clearwater Forest" processor family during September's Innovation Event—their roadmap slide (see below) included other Birch Stream platform architecture options. Earlier this week, Team Blue's software engineers issued a Linux kernel patch that contains details pertaining to codenamed projects: Sierra Forest, Grand Ridge and the aforementioned Clearwater Forest. All E-Core Xeon "Sierra Forest" processors are expected to launch around the middle of 2024—this deployment of purely efficiency-oriented "Sierra Glen" (Atom Crestmont) cores in enterprise/server chip form will be a first for Intel. The Sierra Forest Xeon range has been delayed a couple of times; but some extra maturation time has granted a jump from an initial maximum 144 E-Core count up to 288. The latest patch notes provide an early look into Clearwater Forest's basic foundations—it seems to be Sierra Forest's direct successor.

The Intel Xeon "Granite Rapids" processor family is expected to hit retail just after a Sierra Forest product launch, but the former sports a very different internal configuration—an all "Redwood Cove" P-Core setup. Phoronix posits that Sierra Forest's groundwork is clearing the way for its natural successor: "Clearwater Forest is Intel's second generation E-core Xeon...Clearwater Forest should ship in 2025 while the open-source Intel Linux engineers begin in their driver support preparations and other hardware enablement well in advance of launch. With engineers already pushing Sierra Forest code into the Linux kernel and related key open-source projects like Clang and GCC since last year, their work on enabling Sierra Forest appears to be largely wrapping up and in turn the enablement is to begin for Clearwater Forest. Sent out...was the first Linux kernel patch for Sierra Forest. As usual, for the first patch it's quite basic and is just adding in the new model number for Clearwater Forest CPUs. Clear Water Forest has a model number of 0xDD (221). The patch also reaffirms that the 0xDD Clearwater Forest CPUs are using Atom Darkmont cores."