14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may not have released the Haswell-EP-based series of Xeon central processing units, but that didn't stop someone from selling one of them. One has to wonder what the world would be like without eBay.
Likely not as boring as a world without shrimp, or a world with nothing but shrimp, but we probably shouldn't digress too much too early on.
The Intel Haswell-EP Xeon E5-2600 v3 processor, or at least a sample of it, was sold through the online auction website not long ago.
That it somehow came out ahead of its own launch is one thing, but the fact that it shipped without an R3 motherboard is double puzzling.
You see, the Xeon E5 v3 chips are designed for the LGA 2011-3 or Revision 3 socket, known as the R3 socket for short.
Moreover, they are meant to be used in dual-socket systems, which makes the term “central processing unit” a bit incorrect, since there won't be a central chip, but two processors working in tandem from their respective halves of the mainboard.
The servers based on motherboard+Xeon E5 v3 kits are bound to breeze through most tasks, with their QPI Bandwidth of 9.6 GT/s.
Xeon E5 2600 v3 series chips will have up to 14 cores, but the one shipped through eBay has 12, backed by 30 MB of L3 cache memory.
Both DDR3 and DDR4 random access memory is supported by it, which is impressive, even if DDR4 memory will be rare (if at all available) until 2015. The max DDR4 clock is of 2133 MHz.
Speed-wise, the leaked Intel Haswell-EP Xeon E5-2600 v3 sample runs at 2.5 GHz, with the Turbo Boost technology capable of pushing it to 3 GHz if necessary.
Hyper-Threading technology is supported of course, allowing the physical cores to appear as double the number of logical cores (threads) in Windows. So, we're looking at 24 threads in this instance.
At this point, we can only sit back and wait to see if the one who bought the processor posts some sort of benchmark or server configuration.
It's unlikely though, because he (or she) can't really do that without an R3 motherboard, and we haven't seen any of those anywhere. Then again, maybe the Xeon's sale will give the unlikely holder of an R3 mainboard the final push they may need to put it up for order on eBay as well.
More likely, however, the buyer will just have to wait until the formal product release like everyone else.