Intel Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon E5-2600 processors released

The Sandy Bridge architecture has already been refined for the high performance consumer, in the form of Sandy Bridge-E and LGA 2011. Intel have now finished refining the Sandy Bridge architecture for the enterprise user and they have announced that Sandy Bridge-EP is finally ready. Enterprise grade processors always take longer to get to market as they need to be optimised for reliability, optimal power consumption and be ready in large quantities so businesses can start making bulk orders.

The reason for the LGA 2011 socket was to provide more pins for the additional bandwidth required on the Sandy Bridge architecture. LGA 1155 only provides enough pins for four hyper threaded cores, whilst the additional pins on LGA 2011 provide that extra width for the 8 cores and 16 threads that Sandy Bridge-EP is capable of delivering. The new Sandy Bridge-EP processors, in addition to having up to 8 cores and 16 threads, will support a staggering 768GB of system RAM per processor. Intel is claiming 80% performance gains over the previous generation, although they didn’t specify how that figure was derived so take it with a pinch of salt (but initial testing does show a dramatic performance increase over the last generation of Xeons).

The new Xeons will support AVX (Advanced Vector Extension), Turbo boost 2.0, Hyper threading andVT (Virtualization technology). Additionally the PCI-E controller on the Sandy Bridge-EP processors will be PCI Express Generation 3 ready supporting up to double the bandwidth over PCI Express generation 2. Intel has a new and improved Trusted Execution Technology (TXT15) which reduces exposure and damage to malicious attacks. From today the following manufacturers are preparing to announce Sandy Bridge-EP based systems: Acer, Appro, Asus, Bull, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, Oracle, Quanta, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro and Unisys.

Pricing is extravagant as expected. There are 17 parts ranging in price from $198 to $2,050 in 1000 unit quantities. There will be three other units that lack the QPI lane required for dual socket motherboards (which will make these essentially Xeon branded equivalents of the Core i7 Sandy Bridge-E processors) with a $284 to $1,080 price tag in 1000 unit quantities.

VR-Zone have already been testing these new processors from Intel. Early indications show two 8 core Xeon E5-2660 processors at 2.2GHz absolutely demolish two 16 core Opteron 6274 processors at 2.5GHz in all tests. Yoy can read the full review here.

Source: PR