Intel unveiled three agentic AI architectures at Hot Chips 2026, including the Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids, Crescent Island AI accelerator, and Core Series 3 Wildcat Lake. The Xeon 7 features 256 cores and 1,280 MiB of L3 cache, built on the Intel 18A-P process.
The Crescent Island accelerator offers 32 Xe cores and up to 480 GiB of LPDDR5X memory in partner designs. Meanwhile, the Core Series 3, available since April 2026, utilizes UCIe to connect tiles and features an NPU delivering 17 TOPS of AI performance.
These releases position Intel against AMD's 256-core Epyc 9006 Venice, arriving in late 2026. With Xeon 7 and Crescent Island launching in 2027, Intel is leveraging Foveros Direct 3D packaging and CXL 3.0 to scale infrastructure for next-gen AI workloads.