On May 5th, Intel officially announced their new E7 v3 lineup of Xeon processors. This replaces the Xeon E7 v2 processors, which were based on Ivy Bridge-EX, with the newer Haswell-EX architecture. Interestingly, WCCFTech has Broadwell-EX listed next, even though the desktop is expected to mostly skip Broadwell and jump to Skylake in high-performance roles.
The largest model is the E7-8890 v3, which contains eighteen cores fed by a total of 45MB in L3 cache. Despite the high core count, the E7-8890 v3 has its base frequency set at 2.5 GHz to yield a TDP of 165W. The E7-8891 v3 (165W) and the E7-8893 v3 (140W) drop the core count to ten and four, but raise the base frequency to 2.8 GHz and 3.2 GHz, respectively. The E7-8880L v3 is a low power version, relatively speaking, which will also contains eighteen cores that are clocked at 2.0 GHz. This drops its TDP to 115W while still maintaining 45 MB of L3 cache.
Image Credit: WCCFTech
The product stack trickles down from there, but not much further. Just twelve processors are listed in the Xeon E7 segment, which Intel points out in the WCCFTech slides is a significant reduction in SKUs. This suggests that they believe their previous line was too many options for enterprise customers. When dealing with prices in the range of $1,223 – $7,174 USD for bulk orders, it makes sense to offer a little choice to slightly up-sell potential buyers, but too many choices can defeat that purpose. Also, it was a bit humorous to see such an engineering-focused company highlight a reduction of SKUs with a bubble point like it was a technological feature. Not bad, actually quite good as I mentioned above, just a bit funny.
The Xeon E7 v3 is listed as now available, with SKUs ranging from $1223 – $7174 USD.
All Spam and no posts, except
All Spam and no posts, except this post pointing out the SPAM, But as a reminder do not read reviews of server SKU from enthusiast websites without visiting the enterprise server review websites first!
You will get a better overview of Intel’s competition and plenty of benchmarks against Oracle’s Sparc, IBM’s power8s, as well as the third party licensed Power8s, benchmarks on the professional enterprise websites. Enthusiast’s websites are TOO dependent on review samples, and lack the cash to hire the experts to review server systems. Those third party Power8’s are going to be a headache for both AMD, and Intel, although AMD will have a custom HPC/Server SKU in the future that may do well for the price, as it will have a full bore Greenland GPU accelerator to go along with 16 full fat Zen cores. Anandtech has an interesting article comparing this Intel SKU against the competition, Power8, but do visit the professional server/enterprise websites for a more thorough comparison of server SKUs.
Do not forget that the Power9’s are coming and the power8s will come down in price, and maybe even the third party OpenPower licensees will be getting the full feature Power8 SKUs that IBM is currently reserving for its internal use, but even the lesser OpenPower Power8 SKUs are still competitive against Xeon, especially in price, against any of IBM’s internal use Power8 based server kit. The third party Power8 market has about 118 or so, licensees so things will get interesting in the server market over the next few years. AMD has its GPUs as accelerators paired with Zen and HBM memory to give it some leverage in the workstation/HPC market in 2016-2017. AMD’s workstation SKUs are more affordable for graphics uses than Nvidia’s pricy SKUs. The server market is about to experience some heavy price/performance competition that will result is some very good deals for the buyers of Rendering/graphics workstation grade systems.