Intel today announced a series of data center advancements, including new Intel Xeon 6+ processors, an expanded 800 Series Ethernet portfolio featuring the Intel Ethernet E835 controllers and network adapters, and continued progress on its AI accelerator roadmap, including updates on Crescent Island. Together, these developments highlight a clear industry shift: as AI becomes more agentic, the CPU is re-emerging at the center of modern AI infrastructure. With Xeon serving as the control plane, Intel is taking a systems-level approach to performance and efficiency at scale — delivering platforms designed for increasingly agentic AI workloads, where orchestration, data movement, and sustained inference are critical across data center and network environments.
“AI doesn’t scale as a collection of parts—it scales as a coordinated system,” said Kevork Kechichan, executive vice president and general manager of Intel Data Center Group. “As AI becomes more agentic, the constraints shift to orchestration, concurrency, and data movement. That shift reinforces a core reality: the CPU remains the control plane for the modern AI infrastructure. With Xeon 6+ and Ethernet E835, we’re tightly coupling compute and networking to reduce bottlenecks and enable efficient, secure scaling of real-world agentic workflows.”
Introducing Intel Xeon 6+ Processors
Intel Xeon 6+ processors extend the Xeon 6 family with a focus on performance density, power efficiency, and operational scale for cloud-native, agentic AI-driven, and network-intensive workloads. Built on Intel 18A — its first use in a data center CPU — Xeon 6+ is engineered for sustained performance under real-world power constraints—addressing orchestration, concurrency and data movement demands of emerging agentic AI.
Optimized for environments where watts per rack, throughput per core, and latency predictability are critical, Xeon 6+ emphasizes scale-out performance — making room for new AI workloads without requiring disruptive data center redesigns.
Key highlights include:
- Up to 288 Efficient-cores, delivering up to 2.5 times more performance compared to the previous generation, and up to 45% better performance per thread per watt versus the competition – enabling high concurrency and strong responsiveness for cloud-native, telecom, and agentic AI-driven workloads.
- 12-channel DDR5 memory with scalable bandwidth for high-density systems
- 96 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 and CXL support to accelerate data movement across heterogeneous infrastructure.
- Intel Application Energy Telemetry (AET) enables real-time workload-level CPU energy and activity telemetry, improving visibility into energy consumption at the workload-level starting with Intel Xeon 6+ processors.
- Up to 9:1 server consolidation, reducing footprint and total cost of ownership vs. 2nd Gen Intel Xeon.
- Security built into silicon, including Intel SGX and Intel TDX, to support confidential and multi-tenant deployments.
Intel Xeon 6+ processors are already being tested within telecom network infrastructures and configured into data center systems with platforms available across the ecosystem. These include servers, networking and integrated solutions from and used by ASUS, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, GIGABYTE, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro – and others developing on Xeon 6+ today.
Intel Ethernet E835: High-Efficiency Networking for Next-Gen Infrastructure
The Intel Ethernet E835 controllers and network adapters are designed to deliver performant, power-efficient connectivity for modern data center, enterprise, edge, and AI environments.
Key highlights include:
- Flexible Connectivity: Delivers 200 GbE throughput with multiple controller and adapter configurations supporting data rates from 10GbE to 200GbE.
- Industry-leading Power Efficiency: Intel E835-CQDA2 network adapter delivers up to 1.9 times higher performance per watt than the comparable NVIDIA ConnectX-6 DX and 1.4 times higher than Broadcom BCM957508-P2100G.
- Network Optimization: Implements RDMA (RoCEv2/iWARP) to reduce CPU utilization and maximize efficiency.
- Security & Management: Integrates Hardware Root of Trust and signed SPDM with DMTF-based manageability.
- 10+ Year Lifecycle: Built for long-term reliability and support.
More Performance for SMB Entry Servers
Intel also announced the general availability of a new 12-core option in the Intel Xeon 6300 processor family for entry servers that raises the platform ceiling beyond 8 cores for the first time.
Crescent Island: Building Momentum in AI Inference
Intel’s next-generation data center GPU, code-named Crescent Island, built on the Xe 3P architecture extends the proven Xe architecture delivering enhanced efficiency and performance-per-watt while maintaining broad software compatibility for modern AI workloads.
Equipped with LPDDR5x memory, Intel’s Crescent Island delivers up to 480 GB capacity to efficiently handle large, token-intensive workloads while reducing total cost of ownership. Its power efficient 350W air-cooled PCIe design enables highly efficient scaling for agentic AI with strong performance-per-watt.
The announcements were made at Computex 2026 in Taipei on June 1, 2026.