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Intel Hardware

Intel Launches Xeon E5 V3 Series Server CPUs With Up To 18 Cores 105

Posted by samzenpus from the check-it-out dept.
MojoKid writes Intel took the wraps off its Xeon E5 v3 server line-up today and the chip, based on Intel's Haswell-EP architecture, is looking impressive. Intel's previous generation Xeon E5 V2 chips, which were based on Ivy Bridge, topped out at 12 cores per socket. The new Xeon E5 v3 processors, in contrast, are going to push as high as 18 cores per socket — a 50% improvement. The TDP range is pushing slightly outwards in both directions; the E5 V2 family ranged from 50W to 150W, whereas the E5 V3 family will span 55W — 160W in a single workstation configuration. The core technologies Intel is introducing to the E5 V3 family pull from the Haswell architecture, including increased cache bandwidth, improved overall IPC, and new features like AVX2, which offers a theoretical near-doubling of floating point performance over the original AVX instructions. Full support for DDR4 DRAM memory is now included as well.
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Intel Launches Xeon E5 V3 Series Server CPUs With Up To 18 Cores More

Intel Launches Xeon E5 V3 Series Server CPUs With Up To 18 Cores

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  • I would have thought a 16 core config would be an efficient number.

    • Re:Why not 16? (Score:5, Funny)

      by GoJays ( 1793832 ) on Monday September 08, 2014 @03:16PM (#47855577)

      You’re on 16, all the way up, all the way up...Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff...Eighteen. Two more cores."

      DiBergi: "Why don’t you just make 16 faster and make 16 be the top number, and make each core faster?"

      Nigel (after taking a moment to let this sink in): "These ones go to 18 cores."

    • At first it was a 32-cores CPU but they had to scale it down because of budget cuts.

      alternate reply: they calculated the number of cores on an old Pentium.

    • The way they design their CPUs it is easy to have pretty much any number that is divisible by 2. It isn't a big deal to have something that is any particular amount more or less. So then it comes down to power, thermal, and die size limits.

      Apparently 18 cores is what they cap out at, this time around. I'm sure you'll be able to get 16 core, and less, chips, that is just the most they could stuff in there before exceeding whatever design limitations they'd set.

    • It's a weird die layout. They have four "columns" of cores - three columns of 4 cores, and one of 6. The memory interface and some other stuff takes up the room that would have been used for the other two cores on the first three columns. I guess they didn't need to be longer, so they used the extra room for two more cores.

    • I would have thought a 16 core config would be an efficient number.

      You may have noticed these are server chips. Intel is now doing the equivalent of ECC with its CPUs - every 9th core is a parity core. There are effectively only 16 cores.

  • compiling (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As a programmer I so want one of these.

    $ make -j 18 # FTW!

    • HyperThreading plus branch prediction says you should use -j72

  • You know what would be awesome? A 42-cores CPU. To keep your cup of tea really, really hot.

  • I remember 8-16 cores being announced YEARS ago, but they never ever appeared in regular desktop computers (well, not at your cheap online stores or mainstream street stores either).

    As a hobbyist 3D modeller, the more cores the merrier (and more memory + cache of course). But I'm kind of disappointed about where we're headed. Announcements of new processor with an astonishing amount of cores appear all the time, but they never appear in the actual stores, are they too expensive or something?

    I remember

    • i think you can get up to 8 cores in a standard desktop.
      These are server cpus. You can put a server cpu in a desktop pc, but these xeon cpus can be found in single, dual or quad variants. The price for one of these 18 core cpus? I figure it should be around 2800$. The motherboards for these will be around 500$. It's not something you'll normally see on someone's desk.

      • i think you can get up to 8 cores in a standard desktop. These are server cpus. You can put a server cpu in a desktop pc, but these xeon cpus can be found in single, dual or quad variants. The price for one of these 18 core cpus? I figure it should be around 2800$. The motherboards for these will be around 500$. It's not something you'll normally see on someone's desk.

        You know, kids buy 500-1000$ graphics cards, just for gaming. So to me, this isn't that far fetched. But of course you're right if we're talking about the Hendersons (Regular office Joe and Jenny Surf)...it would make NO sense for them to purchase an Alienware monster or similar.

        • Yeah but these server chips aren't for gaming. Typically to put in that many cores and keep that amount of TDP, you're going to make sacrifices. Specifically in top speed. You may have 18 cores, but they're definitely not running at 4ghz like the i7-4790K. Try more like 2.7ghz. For gaming, single threaded performance is still king.
          Also for gaming, it's fairly rare today to be cpu locked (cpu being the bottleneck) and instead being the graphics card, memory bus, etc.
          These cpus are first and foremost use

          • Exactly. These are for VMware farms.

            Instead of 50 VM per core, now you can fit 75 VMs per core.

            Which your QA's will stretch to the max anyway, so this is at least saving you money by not having to buy 50% more physical servers.

            • That should read "per processor", yes?
              • I think the changes in v3 probably are able to make the claim of more VMs per for due to memory bandwidth. Of course, then one could say 50% more cores at 20% greater capacity per core (my guess) which would be 65% more VMs per physical server.

                I suppose Cisco will release a quad socket, 6TB RAM blade soon. I hope they'll loan me one to try. I was able to run entire companies with VDI on 3 60-core blade with V2, a little slowly, but effectively. 3 72-core V3 blades should be better.

                The real problem comes tha

    • Re:What happened to the core-wars? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Fwipp ( 1473271 ) on Monday September 08, 2014 @03:35PM (#47855773)

      Most people don't even make use of 4 cores on their desktop, so it doesn't make sense for them to push 16-core consumer chips. If you want to do server-like highly-parallel tasks, maybe you should buy a server CPU.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by alen ( 225700 )

      that went to mobile where the fandroids cream their shorts over any mention of cores and megahertz

    • It's a server chip. You'll need a server motherboard, but you can certainly buy one and use it for your computing needs.

    • Re:What happened to the core-wars? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday September 08, 2014 @04:33PM (#47856393) Homepage

      I've been stuck with my 4 core cpu for the last 6-7 years now and the only thing that has improved my rendering is the NVIDIA GPUs

      6-7 years ago, that's like a Q6600 or so? Have you actually looked at benchmarks like Q6600 vs 4790K [anandtech.com] because current top of the line quad-cores are 3-4 times faster than that.

      I remember 8-16 cores being announced YEARS ago, but they never ever appeared in regular desktop computers

      No, because of a couple things:
      1) Single-threaded performance is still huge and often the bottleneck in interactive work - big multithreaded jobs just decide how long a coffee break you get.
      2) Lots of cores means big die means big costs and poor yields meaning they aren't really interested in selling it at consumer prices.
      3) Companies would no doubt try to use these as cheap servers or whatever and they don't want enterprise users buying anything but Xeon.
      4) You can now get i7-5960x in an "enthusiast" system with 8 cores at least, though it'll cost you $1000. Or you can buy AMDs marketing and get an "8-core" FX processor...

  • These shiny new processor having working TSX instruction sets? The ones that are supposed to help with virtualization?

    • Isn't a TSX an American branded Japanese Honda Accord?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by kirk444 ( 513147 )

        Isn't a TSX an American branded Japanese Honda Accord?

        Not anymore, it was axed, along with the TL, and they were both "combined" to make the TLX.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by alen ( 225700 )

        we have accords here
        the acuras are overpriced honda's for dummies who want "luxury"

    • > These shiny new processor having working TSX instruction sets? The ones that are supposed to help with virtualization?

      TSX is not for virtualization, but for transactional synchronization [wikipedia.org], it provides efficient transaction locking for multi-threaded applications. Not necessarily virtualization, although it can benefit from efficient locking as well

      No, as far as I know, these have TSX disabled [intel.com], or will be with a microcode update, as TSX isn't expected to be fixed until 2015 in Broadwell or Haswell-EX Xeons (not Haswell-EP which these are).

  • at least they have 4 and 8 core models as well (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Monday September 08, 2014 @03:34PM (#47855757)

    SQL server went to per core pricing a few years back and are looking at around 8 cores per server now when we buy new hardware. more cores won't do much for us except send more money to microsoft

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 0xG ( 712423 )
      Yes, this is a real concern - I am worried that 4 & 6 core servers will not be available much longer.
      And I am pretty sure that in a db environment, 2 sockets with 6 cores each will handily outperform a single socket with 12 cores...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Postgres is calling you ... 0xG joooiiiinnn ussss ...

        (in some sort of ghostly voice I guess)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by alen ( 225700 )

        the single 12 core socket will have more on board cache and should outperform 2 sockets. plus the timing issues of running data between 2 physical CPU's

      • Having multiple sockets will only profit you in SOME cases; the rest of the time it will hurt performance -- execution units on the same die can share cached data. Threads which don't rely on passing large amounts of data between themselves (but which move a lot of data individually) would potentially get a bump in throughput using 2 sockets, assuming the bus isn't the bottleneck.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm wondering how long before everyone demands that licensed software only make use of the hardware it's licensed for, which may only be part of the resources available to the server as a whole. For example, a 2-core license for SQL Server could run just fine on a 12-core server, but would only use 2 cores at a time. Make that happen, Microsoft, then we'll take your stupid per-core licensing seriously.

      On a related side note, today I was greeted back to work on a Monday morning by a BizTalk re-licensing issu

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mlts ( 1038732 )

        Of course, tossing in virtualization in the mix is fun as well. For example, if I'm sitting on two boxes with 36 cores, and run a relatively small Oracle instance for VMWare vCenter with one vCPU in fault-tolerant mode, I'm on the hook for 72 cores for the Oracle license. With the cost being around $60,000 per core for the enterprise tier, this can add up. Add to this something like vMotion HA where the license has to include every machine that -could- run the DB, and it can get painful even in the enter

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by alen ( 225700 )

          sounds like if i bent over my ass wouldn't be big enough for oracle

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by mlts ( 1038732 )

            Sybase is exactly the same. You can license it for development by the number of users, or production by the number of cores.

            It can get so expensive due to the licensing model they use, that buying a POWER or SPARC machine actually saves money compared to putting it in a VM environment, just because of whatever the DB -can- touch for CPU cores has to be licensed.

            I'm not sure about MS SQL server, but from what I read, it is pretty similar.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by armanox ( 826486 )

          I'm a fan of the way Oracle is doing the licensing on the Oracle DB Appliance - the box comes with lots of cores, but you license them on demand.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by alen ( 225700 )

        that would actually be nice since the higher core CPU's have more cache which has been shown to increase performance for decades now. i'll take a top end CPU and disable cores any day over buying a lower end CPU just to save on licensing

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mlts ( 1038732 )

      Oracle and Sybase as well have this type of licensing, unless something has changed.

      IBM addressed this with POWER7 and newer in a fairly innovative way. They have an option called TurboCore mode which turns off half the cores. The ones still running can use the disabled core's caches, and because of the space available for heat dissipation, clock speed could be bumped up. The result was half the cores, but almost the same performance due to the faster clock and cache available.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        IBM addressed this with POWER7 and newer in a fairly innovative way. They have an option called TurboCore mode which turns off half the cores. The ones still running can use the disabled core's caches, and because of the space available for heat dissipation, clock speed could be bumped up. The result was half the cores, but almost the same performance due to the faster clock and cache available.

        Intel has it too - it's called "TurboBoost". Basically if the CPU is not under thermal restraint, and the other co

  • the architecture that can achieve the fastest speed on complex relational joins.

    You remember normalized tables and joins of course because they aren't going away since they are the only program constructs that are remotely built on the solid foundation of real math set theory

    AND they aren't even Turing machines!!! LOL.

  • This is really great for doing cpu intensive jobs but what seems to never get any love is moving massive amounts of data around. We need to put as much effort into buss bandwidth as we are with cpu's.

  • Is there any reason for enthusiasts to choose the Core i7 over this?

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