Intel Introduces Haswell E5 Processors

On Monday, on the eve of its annual Intel Developer Conference, Intel announced a new generation of Xeon processors. The Xeon E5-2600 V3 and E5-1600 V3 are built on the Haswell architecture and work with DDR4 memory.

The new generation of Xeon E5 processors come in two families: the E5-2600 V3 series, suitable for servers with two processors per motherboard, and the E5-1600 V3 series, which is more intended for workstations. Following the X99 platform, the processors are based on the Haswell architecture. Unlike the consumer versions of that architecture, the E5-Xeons can handle DDR4 memory. The chipset has also been adapted to process large amounts of data. The network speed has been increased to 40 gigabits and the platform is suitable for a new generation of solid state drives.

The top model from the new Xeon E5 series, the 2699 V3, is equipped with eighteen physical, hyperthreading cores, good for 36 threads. The processor has 45MB L3 cache and has a clock speed of 2.3GHz to 3.6GHz. The processor’s four memory channels can drive up to 768GB of DDR4 memory, with speeds up to 2133MHz. A maximum of 40 PCIe lanes per CPU are available and the processors communicate with each other via two qpi channels. The corresponding chipset is the C612 chipset, which controls, among other things, fourteen USB ports and ten SATA ports.

Server motherboards with the E5-Xeons have, in addition to the gigabit network connector via the chipset, a special network option with 40Gb bandwidth: the XL710 controller. Applications in genetic research, for example, where large amounts of data are involved, would benefit from the increase in bandwidth to retrieve data. The E5-Xeons are also up to three times faster than the Ivy Bridge generation, while they are a lot more economical.