Intel announced that Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" and Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors now natively support DDR5-8000 RDIMMs. The company has been releasing microcode updates to server OEMs and server motherboard manufacturers to combine with UEFI firmware updates that add support for DDR5-8000 speed within product warranty, making it easy for end-users to pair the platforms with 8000 MT/s RDIMMs that the processors will natively support.

DDR5-8000 offers a 25% bandwidth increase over DDR5-6400, which has been the industry standard for DDR5-based processors for the past two years, before which the standard had been DDR5-4800. Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" and "Granite Rapids" processors feature 12-channel DDR5 memory interfaces, and so do the latest AMD EPYC "Turin" processors. "Turin" supports DDR5-6400 RDIMMs natively, and so the introduction of native support for DDR5-8000 is expected to give Intel the upper hand in memory bandwidth, which is especially crucial for high-core count processors.