Intel's Xeon 6+ 'Clearwater Forest' family is now available to a wider set of vendors, and the stack is refreshingly simple: just four SKUs ranging from 144 to 288 cores. List prices run from roughly $4,600 for the 6960E+ to just under $15,000 for the flagship 6990E+. Notably, Intel is not gating any features behind higher-priced chips—every SKU includes 2-socket support, 12 channels of DDR5/MRDIMM, 96 PCIe lanes, and the new Application Energy Telemetry.
The real differentiators are core count, power, and second-order effects. The 288-core 6990E+ offers the highest total throughput, especially in its 450W high-TDP mode with a 2.8GHz all-core turbo. Dropping it to low-TDP mode cuts turbo to 2.4GHz and TDP to 330W. Meanwhile, the 144-core 6960E+ guarantees a 2.4GHz base and 3.0GHz all-core turbo at 330W, giving it roughly 25% better all-core clock speed than the flagship at the same TDP. It also has more L3 cache per core (3MB vs 2MB) and double the memory bandwidth per core.
Because the per-core list price climbs about 63% from the 144-core part to the 288-core flagship, the 6960E+ looks like the sweet spot for workloads that don't need 288 cores but do want the best per-core performance and efficiency. The higher-core SKUs still make sense for throughput-bound scenarios where total performance matters more than cost per core.