Last February, Intel launched the Xeon E7 v2 line of CPUs. Based on the Ivy Bridge architecture, they replaced the original Xeon E7s, developed from Sandy Bridge, that were released in April 2011. Intel is now planning to release Haswell-EX in the second quarter of 2015. No specific SKUs are listed, this information describes the product family as a whole.
This is Ivy Bridge-EX. Haswell-EX will have 3 extra cores (and look a bit different).
To set the tone, these are not small chips. Using the previous generation as an example, Ivy Bridge-EX was over twice the size (surface area) of Ivy Bridge-E, and it contained over twice the number of transistors. While Ivy Bridge-EX was available with up to 15 physical cores per processor, double that with HyperThreading, Haswell-EX is increasing that to 18, or 36 simultaneous threads with HyperThreading. If that is not enough cores, then you can pick up an eight-socket motherboard and load it up with multiple of these.
Other than their gigantic size, these chips are fairly similar to the Xeon E5 processors that are based on Haswell-E. If you need eighteen cores per package, and can spare several thousand dollars per processor, you should be able to give someone your money in just a handful of months.
Power8 has 12 cores at 8
Power8 has 12 cores at 8 threads per core for 96 processor threads, and Tyan/others will not charge as much come 2015!
The non made for IBM power8’s will be coming, and running Linux. Man when Google starts using the Power8’s by the millions, the available software stack is going to be massive, and Maybe Apple will get a license and have some custom made for the Mac Pro, 96 threads of rendering goodness. I am looking at the workstation products that will be made by quite a few manufacturers/licensees. Can You Say server SKU price wars! That CAPI interconnect at 230 GB/s sustained, and 410 GB/s peak memory bandwidth at the DRAM. Man a 2 of these on a dual socket motherboard, that a render farm with 192 processor threads, all unified memory, and coherent across the cores. Just throw in some Nvidia Quadros on the mezzanine module, or PCI and go, or Firepros, at a more affordable cost, but for sure workstation CPU SKUs are going to come down in price, with some good for the wallet competition!
Don’t forget about the Orcale
Don’t forget about the Orcale SPARC T5 CPU which got 16 cores an 8 threads for each core which been out for sometime now. One of the better things about SPARC T5 you can have at least 8 CPUs on one system.
Yes but the sharks with
Yes but the sharks with frickin laser beams are not welcoming any third party licensees, and Larry Ellison in his volcano lair would definitely no be keen on letting go of the IP. We are not talking about IBM made Power8s, we are talking about the licensees making licensed power8s. I am a consumer, and I am only thinking about the competitively low priced server SKUs. I am not a stock holder, I do not care about the stockholders, only that the companies that license and build the Power8’s push the server/workstation market into a price war, so that I can get those dual power8 boards with the Power8 SKUs, at the lowest possible price. If I can get a dual 12 core power8 board from Tyan, or other OEM, or if HP/other can make a workstation in the 5 to 10 grand range, then those 192 threads of dual Power8’s will be happily rendering away(ray interactions and such), that is until the PowerVR people begin to have success with ray tracing hardware on GPUs, enough so that AMD and Nvidia, will have to respond in kind, and I can say goodbye to needing server CPU SKUs for ray tracing, as it can be better done of a GPU.
I love AMD’s struggling and innovating to just stay alive, I want Intel struggling and innovating the same way, and the third party ARM, Power8, and other licensees struggling and innovating to stay alive. I do not own socks, I only care that these companies have enough revenues to enable them to struggle to stay alive, and maybe give their share holders the smallest of profits, just barely above the inflation rate, but not much more profit, maybe companies just cutting executive’s pay to around 20 times what the lowest paid worker makes. The engineers are the important ones, get them working, force all CPU companies into the IP licensing market, and entire industries working to get me more rays traced, or getting those GPUs to take on the ray tracing in a massively parallel way, that no CPU can match. IBM, and Intel, and AMD, etc. could disappear off the face of the earth, I only care about the IP, and that the IP survives, and new IP is created, New GPU IP, and New CPU IP, with more processing power, and at lower costs. If the whole computing market turns into a licensed IP market, so much the better for the consumer, it is better to not have the Intels and the M$s, or any big monolithic monopolies, they are bad for innovation.
Another thing that can be
Another thing that can be said about the SPARC Architecture is that it always seems to win the TPC http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp . They can claim to be able to deliver Systems that are fastest, nearly 100% reliable and competitive; but not for cheap. No longer quite so open either.
If I were to adopt a new Architecture I think it would be ‘ARM Server’ (lots of little Chips) over either the Sparc or the Power8; not that they are not great, just that they were not well adopted. The result being that ‘Forum Support’ is less (but not in quality) and ‘Tech Support’ (Support Contracts) are difficult for an individual to afford.
If I wanted to design my own Cable Monster, for cheap, I would find a way to rack up mini-ITX Boards, with i7s in them. Getting some help (Forum Support) with that should be easy enough and I could beat most anything on Bang per Buck (but we will see what the SeaMicro Freedom fabric uncovers).
Will this chip replace my
Will this chip replace my house furnace? 🙂
You’ll need it to encode 4K
You’ll need it to encode 4K in less than a day at the rate Intel is pushing the CPU industry performance wise.
The E5-2699 v3 already has 18
The E5-2699 v3 already has 18 cores, 36 threads. The E7 version will of course be 4-socket compatible (with 3 QPI links) and maybe increase L3 cache.
Hopefully it can be
Hopefully it can be overclocked by a decent amount.
Also will it make its way into the ultrabook and tablet market 🙂 ?
Why not take a look at
Why not take a look at E5-2699v3?
18cores, 36therads, turbos up to 3.6GHz, 45MB L3 cache, 49.5MB total.