Intel today introduced the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600/1600 v3 product families which are designed to address the requirements of diverse workloads and the rapidly evolving needs of data centres. These processors will be used by enterprises for workloads such as data analytics, high performance computing, telecommunications, cloud-based services, and back-end processing such as the Internet of Things.
The new processor families are a significant upgrade for many reasons. There are numerous enhancements that provide huge performance increases over the previous generation, class-leading energy efficiency, and enhanced security. Based on the Haswell 22 nm architecture, these processors are the first in the server platform to support DDR4 memory.
Furthermore, to facilitate the demand for software defined infrastructure, the new processors expose key metrics, through telemetry, which enable the infrastructure to deliver services to maximise performance, resilience, and optimised total cost of ownership. These key metrics include:
- Platform power
- Inlet temperature
- Airflow
- Outlet temperature
- CPU utilisation
- Memory utilisation
- I/O utilisation
- Compute utilisation per second
A new cache monitoring feature enables orchestration tools more visibility into the workload running in any host, to as to intelligently place and rebalance workloads resulting in faster completion times.
With up to 18 cores, 36 threads, per socket and 45MB of last-level cache, the E5-2600 v3 family offers significant improvements over the previous generation. The large cache is important to keep all the processor cores fully occupied. A new extension to Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX2) offers up to 1.9x higher performance gains by doubling the width of vector integer instructions to 256 bits per clock cycle, and doulbing the floating point operations, from the first generation AVX. DDR4 memory will boost performance of memory bandwidth constrained applications by 1.4x. Hardware encryption performance is also boosted by up to 2x without sacrificing application response times.
Using the new 22 nm, 3-D Tri-Gate technology, the new E5 v3 family cuts overall power consumption. New “per-core” power states dynamically regulate and adjust power in each processor core to maximise power-efficient workload processing. Combining record performance and advanced efficiency features, the new E5-2600 v3 product family makes for a really energy efficient server based on performance per watt.
The Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors can be paired with Intel Communications Chipset 89xx series which features Quick Assist Technology to facilitate faster encryption and compression performance. Additionally, the new Ethernet Controller XL710 family provides flexible 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet performance for virtualised servers and networks.
Still more features like hardware-accelerated nested virtualisation, Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), Platform Protection Technology with Intel OS Guard and BIOS Guard, all come together to help companies fully exploit the benefits of cloud-based services.
The Xeon processors E5 v3 family, in 26 different variants, are already on order by server manufacturers, so enterprise users should find them available for purchase really soon.
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