14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may not be ready to launch the Xeon E7 v3 series of central processing units just yet, and might not be for some good months, but the Internet is ever watchful, which means that specs were bound to surface sooner or later.
There are no full product sheets yet, but the barebones of the specifications have surfaced, thanks to the X series price list (CSV file) and the System x3850 X6 and x3950 X6 Installation and Service Guide documents on the IBM website.
It is clear that the next line of Xeon processors from Intel will be very powerful, even if the TDP (thermal design power) will suffer for it.
Little wonder that people on the net have decided to refer to the chips as the mother of all Leviathans. While no one can really agree on just what sort of creature the leviathan is (we've heard about mammoth-like depictions to space dolphins), everyone thinks “big” when it is spoken or written, which is the whole point.
The Intel Xeon E7 v3 central processing units may not be physically gigantic, but their performance will easily place them ahead of all others, be they from Intel or AMD.
The Intel Haswell-EX series of CPUs
There will be twelve processors in the collection, with only the Xeon E7-8893 v3 being a quad-core chip (3.2 GHz clock, 45MB cache memory, 140W TDP).
All the others either have eight cores, twelve, fourteen, sixteen or eighteen. The 18-core ones outnumber all the others actually (individually).
Admittedly, the 18-core chips have lower clocks, of 2.0 GHz to 2.5 GHz, but they will still outpace all others easily.
Of course, software makers themselves will need to come up with a way to allow their programs to use all those cores in parallel. Fortunately, enterprise applications are better at this than consumer ones.
In any event, all the processors have DDR4 memory support, which was to be expected when Haswell-E units already have that.
Availability
Unfortunately, while Intel is expected to launch the Haswell-EX Xeon E7 v3 central processing units in the second quarter (Q2 2015, April-June period), we don't have a narrower ETA than that, let alone an exact launch date. The prices are unknown as well.
