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Intel Releases Sandy Bridge-based Xeon E5 Series
crookedvulture writes "Desktop and notebook users have been enjoying chips based on Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture for more than a year. Now, workstations and servers can get in on the action with the Xeon E5-2600 series. These Sandy Bridge-EP Xeons offer up to eight cores, 20MB of cache, and a truly staggering amount of I/O bandwidth. Unlike their consumer-grade counterparts, the new chips feature more advanced power management and the ability to deposit incoming data packets directly into the CPU's cache rather than going through main memory. They also plug into LGA2011 sockets, requiring an upgrade to the new Romley-EP platform. No fewer than 17 models are available, with prices falling between $200 and $2000 and TDPs ranging from 60-150W."
The summary is slightly incorrect -- the Xeon E3 series has been out for the workstation market for quite a while (sporting graphics cores on the models ending in -XXX5 too).
Come on new Mac Pros!
We run a large number of XenApp servers as VM's and while total system throughput is important so is single threaded performance. Right now we use x5670's with 2.93 GHz clock speeds and a 95W TDP. I'm wondering if the E5-2660 would be as powerful for single threaded workloads which would get us 33% more total throughput for the same power budget but I'm not sure that a 2.2GHz base clock with a 500MHz turbo boost using the SB core is going to be as fast as a 2.93GHz Westmere core.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
How's linux support for Sandy Bridge coming along? Last I checked, about 6 months ago, there was still a lot of bugs/bad performance with the graphics, power management not working, etc. Do any of the distros have good out-of-the-box support yet?
There have been news items all year about how the E5 was going to usher in a new era of low-cost 10 GbE LOM (LAN on motherboard). Even today's news stories are talking about it. But where's the beef? I've looked through about 30 motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, etc., and the only 10 Gb LOM I've found is on a proprietary Supermicro MB and it's not even ethernet. Sure, system integrators have them, but I'd rather build my own box.
Anyone have an idea where they are?
Daniel
I've had my Windows 7 PC for over a year now, not a single crash. Its made from parts from Intel, Crucial, Western Digital, Gigabyte, Sapphire, LG, Silverstone, Logitech and ViewSonic. What's your point again?
Seriously? Go part for part one Mac pro.
You're talking about systems that have CPUs that cost upwards of 1600 bucks each. With one CPU plus motherboard plus case plus ram plus an upgraded psu to match spec for spec on a pro comes up to about the same price and you haven't even factored in disk, video card or peripherals.
A Mac Pro is relatively priced with its competitors.
The only thing that blows is that Apple nor AMD nor nvidia is interested in support for newer gpus. But if that's your bend, you're probably just going to bootcamp anyway and use whatever gpu you'd like.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I would guess money would be a factor. Many more desktop/laptop CPUs are sold than server class albeit for lower prices. However, consumers are more likely to purchase new computers sooner than businesses who don't buy new servers every year. As for performance, Ivy Bridge should beat Sandy Bridge in the same class.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As for the price, Mac Pros tend to be surprisingly competitive, sometimes even better-priced than the competition, but only for a while after their introduction.
Actually, building your own Mac Pro, with roughly the same parts, costs around $2k less than the Mac Pro. For example, with the baseline dual-socket Mac Pro 5,1 you get two 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5620 processors, 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, a 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA HDD, an ATI Radeon HD 5770, an 18x SuperDrive, and a Magic Mouse/Trackpad and keyboard for $3949. For $2022 you get virtually same components:
Intel Xeon E5620 Westmere 2.4GHz 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 80W Quad-Core Server Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117234
Price: $390 * 2 = $780
SUPERMICRO MBD-X8DTi-LN4F-O Dual LGA 1366 Intel 5520 Extended ATX Dual Intel Xeon 5500 and 5600 Series Server Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182219
Price: $429
Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1333 Server Memory
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139575
Price: $79
PLEXTOR Black 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 12X DVD-RAM 8X BD-ROM 8MB Cache SATA 12X Blu-ray Writer
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827249079
Price: $147
MSI R5770 Hawk Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127490
Price: $114
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533
Price: $139
Thermaltake Toughpower W0132RU 1000W ATX12V / EPS12V
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153053
Price: $334
(Note that I splurged a bit some areas and you can bring that total down by $200 or so.) Now, taking out the above quad core Xeons and replacing them with:
Intel Xeon X5670 Westmere 2.93GHz 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 95W Six-Core Server Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117229
Price: $1442 * 2 = $2,884
you could have a $6649 Mac Pro for only $4126. If you wanted to put all of that into a Mac Pro case, you'd need to spend another $170 (http://www.macpartsonline.com/mac-pro-parts/922-9631-enclosure-without-power-supply-mac-pro-mid-2010-a1289.html), around $300 for the remaining case components (like the drive covers, fans, etc.), and some money for various power tools, provided you didn't own them already.
Of course, there are a few ways you can bring down the price of the Mac Pro. For instance, you can grab the baseline, single socket version, sell the processor for $150 and motherboard for around $400, and then buy the dual socket motherboard for $500, a second heat sink for about $150, and the dual 6 core Xeons for $2884. At that point, you'll be looking at $5483 instead of $6649.
you don't need a 1K PSU in a one cpu system and other stuff in the mac pro is over kill. Now apple needs a $1000-$1500 1 cpu desktop system. The 1 cpu mac pro at $2500 is very over priced and the mini is to small and under powered for people who need a good desktop.
Actually what he's frustrated about isn't the Mac Pro, it's that there's no normal Mac. Not a micro, not a all-in-one, not pro. Just a normal box that you'd find at any PC store that uses normal consumer CPUs, normal RAM, normal graphics cards, normal HDDs, normal everything. Because he might like OS X, he might like Mac software, but the hardware is such a total mismatch it's not going to happen. Been there, considered that but the only Mac I'd consider buying is a Mac laptop because luckily the form factor is so constrained they can't help being like a PC laptop.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What a humorous, yet snide, response to my merely pointing out and verifying that you can have a workstation with the same quality as a Mac Pro, at least where the components are concerned, not necessarily functionality and aesthetics, for much, much less than what you could get through Apple; clearly, you have some serious issues that you need to address.
Oh, and to answer your question, yes I do have a job: I work as an applied maths researcher and pay for my salary, research endeavors, and travel arrangements to present papers at conferences like NIPS, ICCV, CVPR, and ECCV through the annual interest made on my investments and healthcare patent royalties from GE, Intel, Honeywell, etc. so I don't have to bother with writing grant proposals or department politics.