Intel has announced that they would soon launch their latest 15 core Xeon E7 Ivytown processor for high-end servers. Only a few month back at IDF13, Intel announced their latest Xeon E5-2600 V2 processors based upon the Ivy bridge architecture.
Intel To Launch Xeon E7 Ivytown 'Ivy Bridge-EX' Processor With 15 Cores
The Xeon E7 processors would be part of Intel's Ivy Bridge-EX lineup which includes the flagship Xeon E7-8800 processor with 15 cores and 30 threads. Till now, Intel only had 12 cores and 24 threads on their Xeon E5 based Xeon E5-2697 v2 and Xeon E5-2695 v2 processors. While the flagship chip would debut under the Xeon E7-8800 branding, Intel would also launch several Xeon E7 8800/4800/2800 v2 based processors which will hit market soon.
The Brickland platform as Intel names it would enable 8-socket systems and plus for workstation usage. The new Ivy Bridge-EX Processors including the Intel Xeon E7 Ivytown chip would also be able to support ECC DDR3-1600 and DDR4-2133/2400/3200 memory configurations along with a new version of Quick Path Interface upgraded to v1.1 for v1.0. The Intel Xeon E7-8800 v2 family would be enabled for 8 Socket and 8 socket plus solutions for enterprise market and would boast 15 cores with 30 threads. The Brickland platform would be based on the C600 Series chipset. The new Ivy Bridge-EX Xeon E7 family would also be able to support upto 12 TB of memory in 8S server configuration which is three times the memory capacity as last generation Westmere -EX processors.
"Dual-core chips dominate laptops, while desktops are largely at quad-core. But faster processors are needed in servers handling tasks ranging from basic cloud transactions to supercomputing, which is why more cores are being added to chips, McCarron said.
The 15-core chip will provide incremental performance benefits to the 12-core Intel chip," McCarron said. via ITWorld
With the Intel Xeon E7 Ivytown chip, Intel would come close to AMD in the core wars which AMD seems to have abandoned on their FX CPUs but still win it in the Opteron server segment. AMD's current top end 6300 CPU has 16 cores based on the Piledriver architecture while the Intel Xeon E7 Ivy town would ship with 15 cores based on the 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture. The chip from Intel would obviously be faster due to the faster IPC of Ivy Bridge compared to Bulldozer.
Intel did not mention any release date for their Ivy Bridge-EX Xeon E7 processors but they are likely to be announced this month. We will update you with details as soon as new information arrives.
