14 DAY TRIAL // Right now, there are two server-class products from Intel that are based on the Broadwell microarchitecture. The Xeon E3-1200 v4 series, that is dedicated to single-socket server machines, is one of them, and the other is the Xeon D family, which has just received some new members.
Intel’s Xeon D family includes products dedicated to microservers, being implemented as systems on a chip and coming with 8 "Broadwell" CPU cores on a die, together with 12 MB of L3 cache and a series of I/O interfaces. The first Xeon D SoCs included in this lineup, D-1520 and D-1540, were released this spring, and they will soon be replaced by the Xeon D-1521 and D-1541 models, which come with higher clock rates and support for DDR3 memory.
The most powerful of the two, the Xeon D-1541, will arrive on the market with both base and turbo frequencies increased by 100 MHz to 2.1 GHz and 2.7 GHz, while its memory controller will offer support for DDR3-1600 and DDR4-2400 memory modules.
In addition, it seems that the SoCs will have a mysterious "KR functionality added," but the Product Change Notification (PCN) in which the new products are mentioned does not offer any specifics of what KR means exactly. This way, the new D-1541 will be exactly the same as the previous "Broadwell" CPUs with 8 cores, 12 MB of L3 cache, and a very eco-friendly 45 Watt TDP.
We're still a long way from the "Purleys"
Its smaller sibling, the Xeon D-1521, will have a base frequency of 2.4 GHz and will go as fast as 2.7 GHz under Turbo Boost maximum frequency. Just like its bigger brother, the Xeon D-1521 will also feature DDR-2133 memory support and the "KR functionality" fitting into the same 45 Watt TDP. The major difference, obviously, is its lack of 4 cores when compared to the D-1541. The D-1521 will have 4 CPU cores, and 6 MB of L3 cache.
The new CPUs from Intel will be based on the newer Broadwell-DE microarchitecture and will have PCI Express 2.0 together with 3.0, SATA 3, USB 2.0/3.0 and Ethernet controllers, perfect for the microserver environments it targets.
According to CPU World, the new D-1521 and D-1541 CPUs will arrive to Intel clients on November 2 of this year.