AI workloads are eating into datacenter capacity faster than most operators can add to it, and once the power budget is spent and the racks are full, the wall is a physical one.  Server consolidation, once treated as a long-term efficiency project, has become an immediate operational priority.

In our latest Hot Seat, Tim Phillips talks to Kira Boyko, product director at Intel, about how the Intel Xeon 6+ processor with 288 E-cores has been engineered with core density and efficiency in mind to address that constraint. Many organizations cannot easily build new datacenters or expand the ones they already have, Boyko explains, particularly at the edge. That makes consolidating legacy servers onto a denser, more efficient platform the practical route to immediate efficiency and TCO gains. It also recovers space and power budget that the next generation of AI infrastructure will demand.

The Intel Xeon 6+ processor is built for that high-density environment, with particular relevance for 5G core and cloud-native use cases.

Consolidation and AI expansion, Boyko argues, can no longer be treated as separate exercises. Retiring older server estates onto Intel Xeon 6+ is how operators create the headroom their next AI deployments will require.

Watch the Hot Seat for Boyko's view on the case for upgrading, the performance and efficiency gains on offer, and how soon Intel Xeon 6+ can be put to work.

You will learn about:

Server consolidation as your AI enabler: Why retiring older Xeon servers onto Intel Xeon 6+ can recover fleet footprint and energy budget, and why that recovery is likely to be a precondition for AI innovation across many service providers.

New in Intel Xeon 6+: The shift to Intel's 18A manufacturing process doubles the core count and delivers a five-fold increase in last-level cache, alongside faster memory. This product is engineered for core density and delivers performance per watt, efficiency and TCO gains through consolidation.

Help for 5G and edge environments: Why performance-per-watt now matters more than raw speed for telco and edge deployments, where power availability is scarce, cooling infrastructure is constrained, and carbon reduction commitments cannot be wished away.

Security at scale: How Intel's SGX and TDX deliver hardware-level isolation for containerized workloads, cloud deployments, and agentic AI applications, with TDX enforcing security policy during execution rather than after the fact.

How to monitor application energy usage: What Intel Application Energy Telemetry captures that package-level monitoring misses, including accurate per-workload billing and identification of the heaviest power consumers.

Benchmarking against the competition: How Intel Xeon 6+ stacks up against AMD's EPYC 9965, and which metrics matter most when comparing performance in tomorrow's datacenter.

Anyone responsible for infrastructure refresh, server fleet management, or making AI ambitions fit within a fixed datacenter footprint will want to watch this one.

Sponsored by Intel.