Intel Releases Sandy Bridge-based Xeon E5 Series 96
crookedvulture writes "Desktop and notebook users have been enjoying chips based on Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture for more than a year. Now, workstations and servers can get in on the action with the Xeon E5-2600 series. These Sandy Bridge-EP Xeons offer up to eight cores, 20MB of cache, and a truly staggering amount of I/O bandwidth. Unlike their consumer-grade counterparts, the new chips feature more advanced power management and the ability to deposit incoming data packets directly into the CPU's cache rather than going through main memory. They also plug into LGA2011 sockets, requiring an upgrade to the new Romley-EP platform. No fewer than 17 models are available, with prices falling between $200 and $2000 and TDPs ranging from 60-150W."
The summary is slightly incorrect -- the Xeon E3 series has been out for the workstation market for quite a while (sporting graphics cores on the models ending in -XXX5 too).
Are there any benchmarks posted yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Where's the 10GbE? (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been news items all year about how the E5 was going to usher in a new era of low-cost 10 GbE LOM (LAN on motherboard). Even today's news stories are talking about it. But where's the beef? I've looked through about 30 motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, etc., and the only 10 Gb LOM I've found is on a proprietary Supermicro MB and it's not even ethernet. Sure, system integrators have them, but I'd rather build my own box.
Anyone have an idea where they are?