Intel introduces Xeons with fifteen cores

Intel has introduced its latest line of processors for servers. With their fifteen cores, the Xeon e7 v2 processors should deliver significantly better performance than the previous generation Xeons and also support much more RAM.

The E7 v2 series is suitable for server motherboards with two, four or eight sockets and consists of processors with six to fifteen cores. The Xeons are primarily intended for applications in business-critical environments, such as banking, retail and transport, but also in healthcare. The processors must be optimized for so-called big data, where large amounts of data must be processed. To that end, the new E7 v2 Xeons not only support three times the memory of the E7 series, but also quadruple the I/O bandwidth. The v2 generation can control 1.5TB of memory per processor and the I/O capacity is up to 8GB/s via the qpi interface.

The Xeons are available in eight versions for motherboards with two, four or eight sockets, with type number E7-88xx v2. The clock speeds range from 2.3GHz to 3.4GHz and the amount of L3 cache is up to 37.5MB, with six, ten, twelve or fifteen cores. The TDPs run from 105W to 155W. For boards with two or four sockets, there are the E7-48xx v2-Xeons, also in eight variants. Finally, for two-socket systems, there are four E7-28xx v2-Xeons with twelve or fifteen cores. The performance of the Xeons should have roughly doubled compared to the previous generation when running in a special performance mode. Alternatively, they can run in so-called lockstep mode, providing extra reliable results.