Intel presents Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors with up to 22 cores

Intel has announced the fourth generation of its Xeon E5 2600 processors. The E5 2600 v4 series will feature 27 different models based on the Broadwell EP architecture. The top model, the E5 2699 v4, has 22 cores.

In February, specifications of the Xeon E5 2600 v4 processors were leaked and now that Intel has officially presented the new family of processors for servers, it appears that they were correct. The processors are baked at 14nm, while the v3 models with Haswell architecture were still made at 22nm.

The Xeon E5 processors form the midrange line of CPUs for servers and workstations, in between the E3 and E7 series. Like the E5 2600 v3 processors, the v4 models have support for DDR4 memory. However, the maximum memory speed is now 2400MHz instead of 2133MHz. Compared to the previous generation, the new chips have more cores and more L3 cache. The tdp is unchanged in most cases. The new chips fit into the same 2011-3 socket as the v3 series. With a bios update it is therefore possible to upgrade existing servers and workstations to the v4 generation.

Thanks to the 14nm production process, the E5-2699 v4 processor with 22 cores has a surface of 454mm². That’s smaller than the Xeon E5 v3 model with 18 cores, which has an area of ​​662mm². The new 22-core chip actually has 24 cores, but two are disabled. Each core is associated with 2.5MB L3 cache, for a total of 55MB.

As with the Haswell-EP-Xeons, Intel makes three die configurations for the Xeon E5 processors. In addition to the large slab used for the models with 16 cores or more, there is one of 306mm² that allows for CPUs with 12 to 15 cores. Like the largest ones, this configuration has two memory controllers. The smallest one for Xeons with 10 cores or less uses a single memory controller that can drive four channels.

Anandtech notes in a review of the E5 2699 v4 that the chip does not always beat its predecessor with fewer cores. The v3 variant with 18 cores achieves higher turbo speeds and is therefore faster when the number of cores is not the deciding factor. For virtualization purposes, the v4 with its 22 cores is clearly faster.

Before the introduction of the E5 v4 processors, there was also a rumor that Intel would come with a quad-core version that has a clock speed of 5.1 GHz. According to the reports, it was the E5-2602 v4 with 10MB cache and a TDP of 165W. Intel has not announced this processor, so for now that rumor does not seem to be true.

Intel Xeon E5 2600 v4 processors for servers and workstations, price per thousand CPUs.

Intel Xeon E5 2600 v4 processors for embedded applications, price per 1,000 CPUs.