14 DAY TRIAL // Most of us may not really be interested in anything set to show up after next year. After all, there'll be plenty of time in 2014 to worry about 2015 and beyond. That doesn't mean that things aren't already on the move though, as Intel has just shown.
Then again, that's not totally accurate either, since it's the Chinese VR-Zone website that provided the latest information on the Xeon line.
VR-Zone managed to uncover information about the fifth generation of Xeon E3 server / data center / enterprise / workstation processing units.
And in doing so, it also found out about the associated chipset, the Greenlow platform, and that the new Xeon E3 will be called Skylake, or are codenamed Skylake right now.
Skylake architecture is made on the 14nm process technology and will incorporate 2 or 4 CPU cores, plus Hyper-Threading technology.
For those unaware, Hyper-Threading technology allows an operating system to view and use physical cores as double the number of logical cores, or threads.
That said, the Skylake Xeon E3 chips will have a memory controller capable of handling four DIMMs of DDR4-2400 RAM (random access memory), for up to 64 GB dual-channel setups.
What's more, the DMI 3.0 specification will be supported (the latest desktop management interface version).
As for the Greenlow platform, it consists of the Sunrise Point PCH, the Jaksonville Phy and the LGA 1151 socket (Intel C230 series chipset).
Said chipset will bring to the fold 8 SATA 6 Gbps ports, the same number of USB 3.0 ports, SATA Express interface support and 20 PCI Express lanes.
It's not totally clear when exactly in 2015 the VR-Zone Xeon E3-1200 v5 CPUs will come out, unfortunately. It probably won't be in the first quarter, since that's more a time for consumer products (the Consumer Electronics Show CES comes to mind), so that leaves the second quarter or the rest of the year.