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.
It is difficult to call Intel's E-core server chips a “clone” of Zen 5c. Sierra Forest was announced before Zen 4c, and they're actually designed-for-area cores instead of just resynthesizing the same chip with a different library (which is the thing you do if you suddenly need a small core, but don't have time to make a proper one) and less cache, like Zen 5c is.
If it's a clone if anything, it's of Arm's “little” strategy.
And Intel keeps designing chips the "right" way, and they keep digging their own grave. Its almost like Intel spends more money on PR and stealth marketing than they do R&D.
