Intel launches mission critical Xeon E3 and E7 chips

CHIPMAKER Intel has released some Xeon chips for high-end servers and workstations.

Intel's Xeon E7 series chips for servers are based on the Westmere EX architecture while the E3 series chips are aimed at small servers and workstations and are based on the newer Sandy Bridge architecture. Being based on Sandy Bridge, the Xeon E3 chips have a graphics core built-in, though Intel told The INQUIRER that this is in no way its GPGPU strategy.

Intel is launching three E7 families, with the E7-28XX, E7-48XX and E7-88XX all providing 6-core, 8-core and 10-core chips with clock speeds varying from 1.73GHz up to 2.67GHz and cache sizes ranging from 18MB to 30MB. Aside from Intel's E7-4807, which has a thermal design power (TDP) of 95W, all the other Xeon E7 chips have TDP ratings of either 105W or 130W. All of the E7 line except for the 2.67GHz E7-8837 feature Hyperthreading, meaning two threads per core.

For Intel's low-end server and workstation Xeon E3 chips, quad-core is the norm with clock speeds varying from 3.1GHz to 3.5GHz. They have 8MB of cache, no Hyperthreading and the TDP ratings top out at 95W. Intel will ship two low power versions of its Xeon E3 chips, the E3-1270 that runs at 2.4GHz and has a TDP of 45W and the E3-1220L, which is a dual core chip running at 2.2GHz and has 3MB cache. That doesn't sound like much until you note the impressively low TDP of just 20W.

Talking with The INQUIRER, Intel was very keen to point out the virtues of its E7 chip over its predecessor, the Xeon 7500-series, even down to the work the firm did to reduce the power draw from memory modules. Explaining that the Xeon E7 supports 2TB of RAM, the firm said it managed to shave around 1W off the power draw per DIMM. That might not sound like a lot but, given that a fully loaded E7 system can accommodate up to 32 DIMMs, it turns out to be quite a savings.

For years AMD has been using the fact that Intel's Xeon chips require fully buffered DIMMs as a selling point for its Opteron processors. Citing the higher power draw of fully buffered DIMMs, AMD would argue that CPU TDP isn't the only part of the system that should be considered when it comes to power efficiency, which these days is perhaps the most important factor when specifying servers. Now it seems that Chipzilla has started to work on lowering the power draw of supporting components as well as its processors.

Pricing for the Xeon E7 series starts at $774 in 1,000 unit quantities going all the way up to $4,616 for the E7-8870. The Xeon E3 starts off at $189 in 1,000 unit quantities, topping out at $612 for the E3-1280. µ