The Darkmont cores of Clearwater Forest are almost identical with the Skymont cores of Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake S and Arrow Lake H. The only significant differenc

The Darkmont cores of Clearwater Forest are almost identical with the Skymont cores of Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake S and Arrow Lake H. The only significant difference is that they are made with the Intel 18A CMOS process instead of a TSMC "3 nm" process. These Darkmont cores have a performance very similar with the Arm Neoverse V3/Cortex-X4 cores and lower than the performance of AMD Zen 5 compact cores. However, for applications that do not use vector operations, the Darkmont cores have a better performance per die area than Zen 5 compact. For many applications, a 288-core Clearwater Forest will have a lower performance than an 192-core Turin dense, but for some applications it will be faster and the low area per core will enable Intel to sell it for a lower price than Turin dense. It remains to be seen when will be the launch of Zen 6 in 2026, but it is likely that it will be a few months after Clearwater Forest.