The Xeon E7 v3 chips have up to 18 dual-threaded cores and up to 45MB of L3 cache, and Chipzilla tells us that they can deliver a 40 percent performance boost when they go downhill with the wind behind them.
x86 architecture like Xeon products have control of most of the server solutions out there so the release of something in this family is important. When it comes to the competition, like Intel's Power and RISC-based server chips then it is starting to look like Intel is cleaning everyone's clock.
Intel said that the new Intel Xeon E7-8800/4800 v3 product families demonstrate leadership performance and scalability to handle any workload systems with up to 32 sockets available and have industry-leading 1.5TB capability per socket, breaking several benchmark records that represent business intelligence analytics, business processing (wholesale/retail supply chain, enterprise resource planning, etc.) and infrastructure consolidation.
10x the performance
The Xeon E7 v3 family "delivers up to 10x greater performance per dollar" and provides up to an 85 percent lower total cost of ownership over comparable RISC-based systems, the company said.
Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy, said Intel's latest Xeon processors are "closing the gap" with the RISC-based parts made by IBM and Oracle for scale-up systems.
"If you want the absolutely highest performance on SAP, you would look to IBM, but it comes with some caveats," Moorhead said. "The big difference comes in performance per dollar, where Intel-based systems from HP, Dell, or Lenovo could perform better by 5-10x versus an IBM Power-based system."
He should know he was a former VP at AMD.
At the release, Intel shared the stage with Cloudera, which develops Xeon-powered, Hadoop-based data analytics solutions for customers ranging from eHarmony and MasterCard to health care information technology specialist Cerner.
Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly said that a payment card company like MasterCard needs some top security of the and Intel has beefed up on-chip encryption capabilities with the Xeon E7 v3 line, while also enhancing its Intel Run Sure Technology and introducing Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX), a better method of managing the way threaded applications access memory.
Pricing
Intel has released a new price list (below) with specs for its 12 new 22-nanometer Xeon E7 v3 processors, ranging from the $1,223 it's charging for the 8-core, 2.00GHz Xeon E7 4809 v3 to the $7,174 it'll cost you to acquire the 18-core, 2.50GHz Xeon E7-8890 v3. Power draws in the product family range from 115W to 165W, CPU core counts go from quads all the way to 18, and all of the new Xeon E7 v3 parts support DDR3 and DDR4 memory—up to 12TB in 8-socket systems.
Seventeen server manufacturers are on board with Xeon E7 v3 systems set to begin shipping later this year, according to Intel. These are Bull, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, Oracle, PowerLeader, Quanta, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro, and ZTE.
