Intel Announces 24-core Xeon E7-8894 v4 for $8898

Intel has been busy creating a monster in their labs, now announcing their highest performing multi-core CPU for multi-socket mission-critical servers: the Xeon E7-8894 v4. Featuring a 200MHz speed bump from its predecessor, the new processor is based on the Broadwell-EX and has 24 cores with Hyper-threading, 60MB of L3 cache, 165W TDP and a base/turbo clock of 2.4/3.4GHz. Performance is not the only high number it is known for, the Xeon E7-8894 v4 also comes at a premium priced at $8898, the highest tray price for a mass-production Intel processor ever. The new chip supports quad-channel DDR3-1600/DDR4-1866 and the memory controller can manage 3TB of DRAM per socket. There are also 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes available from the CPU.

Due to the increase in base frequency, Intel claims that the new Xeon E7-8894 v4 sets several performance records in various general, server, HPC and database benchmarks:

• Up to double the queries-per-hour answered enabling smarter decisions for businesses analyzing their sales and customer data.¹ Ad-hoc cost per query has dropped from $21 to just $0.38 in just the past six-years—a 98% cost reduction, while queries-per-hour capability has increased by 19x.²
• Up to 1.3x average performance across key industry-standard workloads.³
• Up to 35% more virtual machines (VMs) and infrastructure applications throughput supported with same service-level agreement level to help IT grow line-of-business (LOB) heterogeneous needs.⁴
• Use 1/3^rd the servers for equivalent performance to lower operational expenses by replacing 4–5 year old installed platforms⁵, savings include lower network and server maintenance costs by up to 92%, lower utilities costs by up to 73%, and lower annual software licensing fees by up to 67%

In comparison, the E7-8890 v4 which formerly sat at the top stop retains its $7174 price tag since it was launched. It shares similar specs as the E7-8894 V4 aside from the 200MHz base clock upgrade. This may not sound like much, but 200MHz represents a 9% performance increase so when applied to critical number crunching, it eventually adds up and could very well justify the $1724 price difference.