Intel Introduces Xeon E5-2600 v3 Processors With Up To 18 Cores

Intel has announced the V3 generation of processors in its Xeon E5 2600 and 1600 lines. These are 32 chips for servers and workstations with a maximum of 18 cores, which are based on the Haswell architecture and which have support for DDR4.

The Xeon E5 family is Intel’s midrange line of processors for servers and workstations. The Xeon E5-2600 series made its appearance with Sandy Bridge-EP (Xeon E5-2600), which were then 32nm chips with a maximum of eight cores. Xeon E5-2600 V2 concerned Ivy Bridge-EP with its production at 22nm and a maximum computing core quantity of 12. So now there is generation 3 based on Haswell-EP.

One of the biggest changes from previous generations is support for ddr4, which brings energy savings to the platform, among other things, in addition to the efficiencies already offered by the Haswell platform, such as voltage control and p-state control. Also, support for ddr4 has an extension for memory speeds up to 2133MHz.

Speed ​​improvements should come from support for Advanced Vector Extensions 2, among other things. The instruction set support doubles the width of vector integer instructions to 256 bits per clock cycle, and performance on workloads that rely heavily on integers is up to 1.9 times, according to Intel. as high as in previous generations.

Intel produces three different dies for Haswell-EP, with 8, 12 and 18 cores, and successively 20MB, 30MB and 45MB last-level cache. The largest has a size of no less than 662mm². Based on the three dies, Intel will release 32 different variants of the Xeon E5 for servers and workstations. These include 26 models in the 2600 V3 series for servers and 6 processors in the 1600 V3 series for workstations.

At the same time, Intel comes with the Ethernet controller XL710 codenamed Fortville. This includes support for 40Gbit/s speeds, but despite the higher throughput speeds and lower latency compared to the previous generations, the consumption in both idle mode and during operation has been reduced, claims Intel.