Intel launches Broadwell-primarily based Xeons with up to 24 cores, 60MB L3 cache, three-D XPoint

Intel announced a brand new lineup of Broadwell-based, excessive-cease Xeons nowadays, the Broadwell-EX E7 v4 circle of relatives. those new server processors offer up to 24 cores, 60MB of L3 cache, aid for brand new RAS capabilities, 3-d XPoint (when to be had), and help for 3DS LRDIMMs. 3DS DIMMs used stacked DRAM to offer multiplied density in a good deal the equal way that 3D NAND flash improves density as compared with conventional 2nd planar NAND.

actual clock fee overall performance improvements, but, are pretty restrained. There can be some specific SKUs where Intel modestly bumped clock costs, but they aren’t the point of interest of this launch.

The chart above suggests how the top-end 18-center and 10-core elements examine with each other throughout each families. even as the E7 v4 Xeon includes help for as much as 24 cores, we desired to compare against the Haswell-based totally E7 v3 circle of relatives to make an apples-to-apples dedication.

At the ten-center mark, the Broadwell-EX is clocked identically to its Haswell predecessor, but gives 15MB greater cache, double the memory (way to the use of 3DS DIMMs), and the extra RAS features mentioned above. The 18-core variation is likewise extremely much like the Haswell-EX core, though there’s one substantial distinction — the more moderen 18-center chip is simply 65% the fee of the antique one. whilst $four,672 isn’t precisely cheap for a processor, those are chips geared toward large iron manufacturing in place of the common purchaser.

Intel has also accelerated its Cluster on Die mode to support four-socket environments. CoD is a technique of dividing every Broadwell-EX chip into a chain of smaller, unbiased cores with localized records inside the L3 cache. In the instance above, the L3 within the yellow organization is devoted to those processors, whilst the inexperienced group’s L3 is dedicated to the needs of its cores. formerly Intel only supported this era in two-socket systems, but Broadwell-EX receives the nod in 4-sockets this time around. Intel is claiming that the E7 v4 structures can enhance overall performance in enterprise trendy workloads by way of up to at least one.3x and save businesses considerable quantities of power, software licensing expenses, and permit them to replace more than one preceding structures with single Broadwell-EX containers.

at the same time as some of the above claims are exceedingly depending on what forms of workloads you’re running, the thought that Intel can use one Broadwell-EX container to replace up to 3 older servers does have a few fact to it. five years in the past, the agency’s EX processors have been based on Westmere and targeted on 6-10 cores.

The clients most probably to gain from Broadwell-EX in comparison with Haswell-EX appear to be those who call for both large quantities of memory, or that want to divide the chip into sub-clusters in 4S structures. each of these talents are new to Broadwell-EX, and its multiplied RAS should lead them to beneficial to the best-end business enterprise servers.