Intel announced that Intel Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" and Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors now natively support DDR5-8000 RDIMMs via firmware updates.

The company released microcode updates to server OEMs and 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 platforms with 8000 MT/s RDIMMs.

DDR5-8000 offers a 25% bandwidth increase over DDR5-6400, the industry standard for two years, preceded by DDR5-4800. Both Intel Xeon 6+ and AMD EPYC "Turin" processors feature 12-channel DDR5 memory interfaces, but Turin supports only DDR5-6400 natively.

The introduction of native DDR5-8000 support is expected to give Intel the upper hand in memory bandwidth, crucial for high-core count processors.