Intel shipped Xeon 6+ on 18A and the Crescent Island AI GPU, both aimed at NVIDIA-free agentic inference.

Xeon 6+ scales to 288 efficiency cores with 2.5x performance and 45% better perf-per-watt. Crescent Island is a 350W air-cooled PCIe GPU with up to 480GB LPDDR5X for low-TCO inference (Intel). The "not NVIDIA-locked" pitch is going to matter more as buyers feel the bill. Optionality at the silicon layer is suddenly a feature people will pay for.