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Intel triples performance in new Xeon E5 v3 series with up to 18 cores and 45MB cache

By Dr. Jimmy Tang - on 9 Sep 2014, 4:26pm

Intel triples performance in new Xeon E5 v3 series with up to 18 cores and 45MB cache

Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel showing off silicon wafer containing Intel's latest Xeon E5-2600 family of processors.

Intel lifted the veil off the new Intel Xeon E5-2600/1600 v3 family of processors at an event held a day just before its annual developer forum. Built to address the increasing demands of diverse workloads and the rapidly evolving data center, the new Xeon processor boasts performance improvement of up to three times over its previous generation. Besides record breaking improvements to its performance, the new Xeon E5 v3 series will feature better security enhancements as well as improved power efficiency. Although still built on Intel's very matured 22nm process technology, the new processors will come with variants ranging from 4 to 18 cores and 10MB to 45MB last level cache sizes.

In addition to adding 50 percent more cores and cache, Intel also introduced new extensions with its Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) that doubles the width of vector integer instructions to 256 bits per clock cycle for integer sensitive workloads while delivering up to 90% more performance in workloads typical of benchmarks like Linpack. In terms of workloads requiring more intense memory usage, the new Intel Xeon E5 v3 series will effectively improve performance by up to 1.4x more, thanks to its support for next-generation DDR4 memory. The new processor will support new DDR4 modules at 1600MHz,1866MHz and 2133MHz frequencies with ECC. The processor will also feature a total of 4 memory channels, giving you a total maximum memory bandwidth of up to 68GB/s.

Encryption and decryption speeds have also been improved by up to 2x with an enhanced Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI). In addition, the new Xeon E5-2600 v3 series will deliver better virtualization density, giving up to 70 percent more VMs per server.

The Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors can be paired with the Intel Communications Chipset 89xx series featuring Intel Quick Assist Technology to enable faster encryption and compression performance to improve security in a wide range of workloads. In addition, it will also support the new Intel Ethernet Controller XL710 family that will further improve networking performance with its new 40 gigabit speed. 

Summary of architecture enhancements on the Intel Xeon E5-2600/1600 processor family.

Besides all its hardware and architectural improvements, what sets the new Intel E5 v3 series apart from its competition is Intel's continuous investment into software defined infrastructure (SDI) which they believe is the foundation for cloud computing. SDI enables resources to be programmable and highly configurable, giving data centers the agility and scale to meet the challenging demands of today's digital services economy. Besides being configurable, capabilities such as telemetry, analytics, and automated actions can further improve performance optimization. With the new processor family, Intel will introduce key sensors and telemetry to further enhance SDI.

Allowing greater visibility into the system, the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family lets you monitor its cache, giving you the ability to analyze performance anomalies in its cache. Such data is useful to IT managers especially when workloads can be efficiently rebalanced and problem applications/scripts can be easily identified in a multitenant cloud environment. Besides that, the new processors also include platform telemetry sensors and metrics for CPU, memory and I/O utilization. 

The new Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processor.

The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family will be offered with 26 different parts that range in price from US$213 to US$2,702 in quantities of 1,000. Intel Xeon processor E5-1600 workstations will be offered with six different parts in prices ranging from US$295 to US$1,723. Apart from these standard SKUs, Intel also offers SKUs for customers with unique requirements, customized for very specific workload needs.

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