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Intel Unveils 10-Core Xeon Processors
MojoKid writes "Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that they will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It has been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural efficiency, these new Xeons are more balanced. The new chips boost the core count to ten (up to 20 threads with HT enabled) and will be offered at a wide range of power envelopes. The new E7 series incorporates the benefits of the Sandy Bridge architecture, its support for new security processing instructions, and its improved power management technology. Intel has also baked in support for low-voltage DIMMs, which allows vendors to opt for 1.35v products."
claiming that they will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance
What's the point of having 10 cores then ?
130W TDB at 2.4 GHz, on the high end. Sadly, that information wasn't in the posted article. http://news.softpedia.com/news/More-Details-About-Intel-s-Upcoming-Xeon-E7-8800-CPU-Line-Emerge-183270.shtml
I've got a SB desktop computer and it just screams. they made some sizable per-clock performance improvements. Also AES-NI is no joke. I am pretty amazed by the speed. Tryecrypt supports it and the benchmark difference is huge. With a 100MB buffer a pure software AES implementation benches at 649MB/sec on my system (553MB/sec for Twofish, 254MB/sec for Serpent). Same test with AES-NI on, 2.7GB/sec. That is 4.2x the speed.
Could be really useful for web servers, particularly if you are looking at going all SSL all the time.
Hopefully Bulldozer will fix it but right now, they don't do so well. Have a look at this HardOCP article on the new SB processors (http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/01/03/intel_sandy_bridge_2600k_2500k_processors_review/3). They tossed in a high end 6 core AMD CPU too. It just gets killed. In many tests, it is below the older 4 core i7 CPUs, in pretty much all of them it is below the 4 core SBs and I don't see a one that it beats the 6 core i7 (the 980X).
AMD offers more cores, but their cores don't do as much. Don't buy in to core hype any more than MHz hype or anything else. More is not automatically better. Have to run benchmarks on it and see how it actually does.
Like I said, hopefully Bulldozer will change that. Hopefully it'll be competitive with Intel per core, per clock and so on. However right now Intel processors just kill.
I'm sure some Sun engineers would disagree.
...if they weren't busy looking for a new job.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Any CPU with where the number of cores is not a power of 2 makes me uncomfortable. Six cores, ten cores - it just feels wrong.