Intel Launches Latest High-End Xeon E7 Chips, and Server OEMs Sign On

Intel has unveiled the new Intel Xeon E7 “Broadwell-EX” server processor family, offering more capacity and higher performance than its predecessors.

According to Intel officials, an eight-socket Xeon E7-8890 v4 delivers up to 40 percent better performance than an IBM Power8 E870 chip and 10 times the performance per dollar, while using half the power.

The chips can be applied to a range of data-intensive workloads, from online transaction processing (OLTP) to supply chain management to ERP. But it’s data analytics Intel is promoting as the key use case.

The vendor put the new E7-8800 v4 chips into its high-end, four-socket servers for data-intensive applications in scale-up environments. Dell officials noted the R930 armed with the E7-8890 v4 chips set three world-record benchmarks on SAP workloads.

The company put the Xeon E7 v4 chips into its x3850 and x3950 X6 (pictured) systems to provide up to 39 percent better performance than the previous generation. The new servers also established 17 industry performance benchmarks, officials said.

The Chinese vendor put the Xeon E7 v4 chips into its line of high-end servers, including the 32-socket KunLun 9032 (far right), which Huawei introduced in March at CeBit 2016.

Fujitsu refreshed its PrimeQuest mission-critical systems with the new Intel processors, and officials noted the combination of high performance and lower operating costs are convincing more Unix users to make the move to x86 systems.

Powered by the new Xeon E7 v4 chips, SGI’s UV 300 system (pictured) scales from four to 64 CPU sockets and up to 64TB of cache-coherent shared memory in a single system. The smaller UV 30EX is a 5U (8.75-inch), four-socket system delivering up to 5TB of in-memory computing power.

While Intel is aiming the new high-end processor at scale-up architectures, the company also is pushing the relatively new Xeon E5 v4 chips for analytics workloads in scale-out environments.

The tech vendor announced that some of its midrange systems, including the PowerEdge R830 rack system, are powered by the Xeon E5-4600 v4 chips. Modular systems such as the FX2 and M1000e (pictured) are based on the FC830 and M830 blades, which also are powered by the latest E5 chips. image: Dell M1000e

Intel officials are touting the many-core Xeon Phi chips as another tool for analytics workloads in scale-out infrastructures. The latest generation, the 14nm Knights Landing chip, offers up to 72 x86 cores and can be used as a coprocessor or primary processor.

Intel bought Altera last year for $16.7 billion to get hold of the company’s programmable chips. Now company officials are pushing Altera’s field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as another analytics tool in scale-out environments.