As Intel’s future continues to be a topic of much rumor and debate, the company’s new product rollouts continue with an emphasis on protecting Intel’s traditional data center market turf and carving out a bigger piece of the AI data center, network, and edge markets for the firm.
This week, Intel launched its latest Xeon 6 P-core CPUs, including the Xeon 6700 Series and 6500 Series processors aimed at a variety of modern data center workloads, including AI. The launch follows the initial unveiling of the Xeon 6 last fall.
For many enterprise workloads, the new CPUs deliver an average of 1.4x better performance than the previous generation Xeon processors, according to Intel. But Intel also is positioning the new processors as host CPUs for GPU accelerators in AI systems. To that end, Intel claimed the Xeon 6 provides up to 1.5x better performance in AI inference on chip using one-third fewer cores than the fifth generation of AMD’s EPYC processors.
Intel also touted the performance-per-watt efficiency of the new CPUs, stating that they allow for “5:1 consolidation of a 5-year-old server on average, with potential for up to 10:1 in certain use cases, resulting in up to 68% savings in total cost of ownership.”
The company also introduced the Xeon 6 system-on-a-chip (SoC), which leverages Intel’s built-in accelerators for virtualized radio access networks (vRAN), media, AI and network security. It also uses Intel VRAN Boost, an integrated accelerator that has been part of previous Intel Xeon VRAN iterations, to deliver up to 2.4x the RAN capacity and a 70% improvement in performance-per-watt compared to previous generations. That news comes just days before Mobile World Congress 2025 is set to kick off in Barcelona, Spain, where many companies, including Intel and competitors AMD and Nvidia, will no doubt discuss the future of AI-based RANs.
During Intel’s recent fourth quarter 2025 earnings call, Intel co-CEO and Chief of Products Michelle Johnston-Holthaus talked of the traditional data center and the new AI data center as two of the company’s main priorities this year, and the importance of the Xeon 6’s role.
“This year is all about improving Xeon's competitive position as we fight harder to close the gap to competition…. The world's data center workloads still primarily run on Intel silicon, and we have a strong ecosystem, especially within enterprise. We are going to leverage these strengths as we work to stabilize our market share in 2025.”
Among Intel ecosystem partner, Lenovo accompanied Intel’s Xeon launch news with its own announcement of ThinkSystem V4 Servers for data centers that will use the new Xeon 6 processors.