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Intel announced a new lineup of Broadwell-based, high-end Xeons today, the Broadwell-EX E7 v4 family unit. These new server processors offer upwardly to 24 cores, 60MB of L3 enshroud, back up for new RAS features, 3D XPoint (when available), and support for 3DS LRDIMMs. 3DS DIMMs used stacked DRAM to offer increased density in much the same way that 3D NAND flash improves density compared with conventional 2d planar NAND.

Actual clock rate performance improvements, withal, are pretty limited. There may be some specific SKUs where Intel modestly bumped clock rates, just they aren't the focus of this launch.

Xeon-Comparison

Click to overstate

The chart in a higher place shows how the elevation-end 18-core and 10-core parts compare with each other across both families. While the E7 v4 Xeon includes support for upwards to 24 cores, nosotros wanted to compare against the Haswell-based E7 v3 family to make an apples-to-apples decision.

At the x-core mark, the Broadwell-EX is clocked identically to its Haswell predecessor, merely offers 15MB more cache, double the retentivity (cheers to the use of 3DS DIMMs), and the additional RAS features mentioned in a higher place. The eighteen-core variant is as well extremely similar to the Haswell-EX core, though there'south one significant difference — the newer 18-cadre chip is just 65% the price of the old one. While $4,672 isn't exactly cheap for a processor, these are fries aimed at large atomic number 26 product rather than the average consumer.

Cluster-on-Die

Intel has also expanded its Cluster on Dice fashion to back up four-socket environments. CoD is a method of dividing each Broadwell-EX chip into a series of smaller, contained cores with localized data within the L3 cache. In the example above, the L3 in the xanthous group is dedicated to those processors, while the dark-green group's L3 is dedicated to the needs of its cores. Previously Intel only supported this technology in 2-socket systems, but Broadwell-EX gets the nod in iv-sockets this time effectually. Intel is claiming that the E7 v4 systems can improve performance in manufacture standard workloads by upward to i.3x and save businesses pregnant amounts of energy, software licensing costs, and permit them to replace multiple previous systems with single Broadwell-EX boxes.

While many of the in a higher place claims are highly dependent on what kinds of workloads y'all're running, the suggestion that Intel tin can use ane Broadwell-EX box to replace up to iii older servers does have some truth to it. Five years ago, the company'southward EX processors were based on Westmere and focused on 6-10 cores.

The customers about likely to benefit from Broadwell-EX compared with Haswell-EX seem to be those that demand either enormous amounts of memory, or that want to divide the chip into sub-clusters in 4S systems. Both of these capabilities are new to Broadwell-EX, and its expanded RAS could brand them useful to the highest-stop enterprise servers.