Intel Released The Xeon E7 v3 Processor Family

We’ve seen and heard a lot about Intel’s mobile and desktop processors lately, but we shouldn’t forget that Intel also creates some of the best server processors in the world. They have just released the latest version of these monsters that come with up to 18 cores and 36 threads, 45MB cache and support for up to 12TB RAM in an eight-socket system.

The new Xeon E7 v3 processors move from the Sandy Bridge architecture to the Haswell but maintains the 22nm manufacturing process for now. We’ll have to wait a little longer for the 14nm versions and while these new chips already impress us, the future process could help with the current power consumption and 165W TDP rating. They are still the best performance per dollar for any business that needs this kind of power.

The new processor family already set 20 new performance world records across a broad range of mission-critical applications where it achieves a 40 percent average performance improvement compared to the prior generation. The processors support configurations with up to 32 sockets and comes with the industry’s largest memory capacity per socket as well as support for both DDR3 and DDR4 memory technology.

New security and reliability capabilities include increased cryptographic performance via the latest Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) and Intel Run Sure Technology that is a unique set of reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features for the Intel Xeon processors.

The new Xeon family of processors contains 12 models for various segments including two high-frequency models that are designed for a subset of database applications requiring the fastest cores available. Starting today, the largest system manufacturers will begin announcing systems based on the new Intel Xeon E7 v3 family platform, including Dell, Cisco, HP, Bull, Lenovo, Oracle, Supermicro and many more.

Processors like these aren’t cheap at all and the prices you see below are when purchasing a quantity of 1000, so it’s unlikely that we’ll find many of these in homes around the world in the near future. They’re still some amazing chips and I wouldn’t mind having a couple myself.