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Intel Launches Xeon E5 V3 Series Server CPUs With Up To 18 Cores

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-it-out dept.

MojoKid writes Intel took the wraps off its Xeon E5 v3 server line-up today and the chip, based on Intel's Haswell-EP architecture, is looking impressive. Intel's previous generation Xeon E5 V2 chips, which were based on Ivy Bridge, topped out at 12 cores per socket. The new Xeon E5 v3 processors, in contrast, are going to push as high as 18 cores per socket — a 50% improvement. The TDP range is pushing slightly outwards in both directions; the E5 V2 family ranged from 50W to 150W, whereas the E5 V3 family will span 55W — 160W in a single workstation configuration. The core technologies Intel is introducing to the E5 V3 family pull from the Haswell architecture, including increased cache bandwidth, improved overall IPC, and new features like AVX2, which offers a theoretical near-doubling of floating point performance over the original AVX instructions. Full support for DDR4 DRAM memory is now included as well.

9 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why not 16? by GoJays · · Score: 5, Funny

    You’re on 16, all the way up, all the way up...Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff...Eighteen. Two more cores."

    DiBergi: "Why don’t you just make 16 faster and make 16 be the top number, and make each core faster?"

    Nigel (after taking a moment to let this sink in): "These ones go to 18 cores."

  2. Re:Why not 16? by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

    At first it was a 32-cores CPU but they had to scale it down because of budget cuts.

    alternate reply: they calculated the number of cores on an old Pentium.

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  3. at least they have 4 and 8 core models as well by alen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    SQL server went to per core pricing a few years back and are looking at around 8 cores per server now when we buy new hardware. more cores won't do much for us except send more money to microsoft

    1. Re:at least they have 4 and 8 core models as well by mlts · · Score: 2

      Of course, tossing in virtualization in the mix is fun as well. For example, if I'm sitting on two boxes with 36 cores, and run a relatively small Oracle instance for VMWare vCenter with one vCPU in fault-tolerant mode, I'm on the hook for 72 cores for the Oracle license. With the cost being around $60,000 per core for the enterprise tier, this can add up. Add to this something like vMotion HA where the license has to include every machine that -could- run the DB, and it can get painful even in the enterprise.

    2. Re:at least they have 4 and 8 core models as well by mlts · · Score: 2

      Sybase is exactly the same. You can license it for development by the number of users, or production by the number of cores.

      It can get so expensive due to the licensing model they use, that buying a POWER or SPARC machine actually saves money compared to putting it in a VM environment, just because of whatever the DB -can- touch for CPU cores has to be licensed.

      I'm not sure about MS SQL server, but from what I read, it is pretty similar.

  4. Re:What happened to the core-wars? by Fwipp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Most people don't even make use of 4 cores on their desktop, so it doesn't make sense for them to push 16-core consumer chips. If you want to do server-like highly-parallel tasks, maybe you should buy a server CPU.

  5. Re:What happened to the core-wars? by alen · · Score: 2

    that went to mobile where the fandroids cream their shorts over any mention of cores and megahertz

  6. Re:What happened to the core-wars? by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've been stuck with my 4 core cpu for the last 6-7 years now and the only thing that has improved my rendering is the NVIDIA GPUs

    6-7 years ago, that's like a Q6600 or so? Have you actually looked at benchmarks like Q6600 vs 4790K because current top of the line quad-cores are 3-4 times faster than that.

    I remember 8-16 cores being announced YEARS ago, but they never ever appeared in regular desktop computers

    No, because of a couple things:
    1) Single-threaded performance is still huge and often the bottleneck in interactive work - big multithreaded jobs just decide how long a coffee break you get.
    2) Lots of cores means big die means big costs and poor yields meaning they aren't really interested in selling it at consumer prices.
    3) Companies would no doubt try to use these as cheap servers or whatever and they don't want enterprise users buying anything but Xeon.
    4) You can now get i7-5960x in an "enthusiast" system with 8 cores at least, though it'll cost you $1000. Or you can buy AMDs marketing and get an "8-core" FX processor...

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  7. Re: TSX by plcurechax · · Score: 2

    > These shiny new processor having working TSX instruction sets? The ones that are supposed to help with virtualization?

    TSX is not for virtualization, but for transactional synchronization, it provides efficient transaction locking for multi-threaded applications. Not necessarily virtualization, although it can benefit from efficient locking as well

    No, as far as I know, these have TSX disabled, or will be with a microcode update, as TSX isn't expected to be fixed until 2015 in Broadwell or Haswell-EX Xeons (not Haswell-EP which these are).