14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has released eight new server central processing units, all of them powered by the years-old Ivy Bridge architecture and featuring up to 12 cores, as well as prices of $551 / €397 – €551 to $4,394 / €3,167 – €4,394.
Yet again, Intel shows its propensity for launching central processing units by the dozen, or half dozen as the case seems to be here. Well, close enough to half a dozen anyway.
At this point, people would probably expect a new range of Haswell-based processors, since that's the current-generation architecture.
That is not the case, however. Instead, Intel has chosen to release some new Ivy bridge chips, which are probably the last on this architecture. A sort of last wave meant to digest remaining inventories perhaps.
Not that Intel did a half-hearted job here. Indeed, if the prices are any indication, then the company definitely held nothing back.
Sure, there is a quad-core chip in the new Xeon collection, and there's even a 6-core chip there, but most are either 8-core or 10-core chips, with even a 12-core thrown in for good measure.
The new processors are marketed under the Xeon E5 brand (the Xeon E5-4600 family to be fully specific) and all have more cores, more cache and greater memory bandwidth than the E5-2600 products.
So now we may as well check out the main stars as it were, from the “weakest” to the best, and the main ones in between.
As we said before, the weakest and cheapest processor is a quad-core unit. It is called Xeon E5-4603 v2 and has 4 cores, 8 threads, 2.2 GHz clock, 10 MB L3 cache memory, a DDR3-1333 memory controller, a TDP of 95W and the aforementioned price of $551 / €397 – €551 (the former is the exchange rate, the latter is the likelier tag in Euro).
The only 6-core chip is the Xeon E5-4607 v2, and has 12 threads, 2.6 GHz clock, 15 MB cache, 95W TDP and DDR3-1333 memory.
The two 8-core chips both have 16 threads and also Turbo Boost overclocking, plus 16/20 MB cache and DDR3-1600 memory (or 1866 in one case and 130W). The prices go from $1,219 / €879 – €1,219 to $2,108 / €1,519 – €2,108.
From there, specifications just steadily escalate, with three 10-core, 20-thread chips of 70/95 W and 20/25 cache.
Finally, the line ends with the Xeon E5-4657L v2, the only 12-core chip in the lot. It has Hyper-Threading (24 threads), Turbo Boost support (2.4 GHz / 2.9 GHz frequency), 30 MB cache memory and DR3-1866 RAM support. The TDP is 115W and the price is a staggering $4,394 / €3,167 – €4,394.