Intel Xeon 6780E 144c/144t 2.2GHz-3.0GHz 330W (PK8077105931400)

Intel Xeon 6780E: 144-Core Sierra Forest CPU for Cloud-Native, High-Density Workloads

The Intel Xeon 6780E belongs to the Intel Xeon 6 family based on the Sierra Forest architecture, built around efficient cores (E-cores) to deliver very high core density and strong performance per watt for cloud-native workloads. With 144 cores, 144 threads, a 2.2 GHz base frequency, turbo speeds up to 3.0 GHz and 108 MB of L3 cache, it targets large-scale, highly parallel deployments where thread count and energy efficiency are more critical than individual core performance.

Sierra Forest is designed as Intel’s first cloud-native Xeon platform, focusing on scale-out services such as microservices, stateless application tiers, API gateways, web frontends, lightweight data processing stages and other workloads commonly found in modern cloud environments. These applications typically scale horizontally and are limited by aggregate throughput and energy costs rather than by maximum single-thread performance.

The Xeon 6780E supports eight channels of DDR5 memory, allowing nodes to be configured with large memory footprints and high bandwidth. This is important when running very high numbers of containers, virtual machines or services on the same node, as memory bandwidth and capacity must keep up with the increased core count to maintain stable performance.

PCIe 5.0 connectivity enables the 6780E platform to attach fast NVMe storage, modern network adapters, SmartNICs and other accelerators. In practice, however, many Sierra Forest deployments will focus on networked storage and external services, using local storage and accelerators primarily for caching and offload rather than heavy computational acceleration.

The architecture of the 6780E is tuned to deliver high efficiency under multi-tenant, scale-out conditions, which makes it highly suitable for cloud providers, large SaaS platforms and organizations building internal platforms with Kubernetes or similar orchestration solutions. High core counts per socket reduce the number of physical servers needed for a given level of throughput, which can lower both capital and operating costs when combined with appropriate power and cooling strategies.

For environments where workloads are predominantly cloud-native, embarrassingly parallel and latency-tolerant, the Intel Xeon 6780E provides an attractive combination of core density, power efficiency and modern memory and I/O capabilities, helping to maximize performance per rack unit and per watt in next-generation datacenters.