Ivy Bridge-EX Arrives – Intel Xeon E7 v2 Released with 20 New SKU Lineup

Intel Xeon E7 v2 Releases with High End SKU Lineup – Ivy Bridge-EX is Finally Here

A couple of things have changed since the last iteration that was
Westmere-EX. For one the previous only supported upto 10 cores where as Xeon E7 v2 is 15 cores (duh). Also the Xeon E7 v2 populates the 32 Socket servers. Comparing westmere-ex to ivy bridge-ex we get the following.

Intel’s upcoming Xeon E7 ‘Ivy Bridge-EX’ lineup
launches this year which delivers an unprecedented amounts of
performance for HPC needs. Intel is preparing their flagship Xeon E7-8890 V2 chip codenamed Ivytown which is the first chip from Intel to boast a core count of 15 coming one step closer to AMD’s Opteron 6300 series which has 16 cores on the top most model.

The chip features an insane 4.31 billion transistors
and a massive die size of 541mm2 with a modular architecture which
splits the cores into blocks of three, each block has five cores with
their own L3 cache, embedded ring bus and I/O. This modular architecture
would scale from top to bottom of the Xeon E7 lineup with Intel shifting and removing the columns to offer cost effective SKUs. The chip features
37.5 MB L3 cache and a TDP of 155 Watts. According to the rumor mill,
the flagship part could cost well over $5000 US. In an 8 Socket
environment, eight of these chips would amount to 120 cores and 240
threads with a 300 MB cache shared via QPI v1.1. The frequency of the chip
is toned down to 2.8 GHz but there are tons of models ranging in core
configuration and clock speeds which can be found in the specification
chart posted at the end of this article.

• 2x Performance
• 3x Memory Capcaity
• 4x I/O Bandwidth
• Support Intel’s Data Protection Tech.

Ivy Bridge-EX is based on the C600 series chipset but would support more memory configurations
up to 12 TB. Beyond the expected ECC DDR3-1600 memory, the CPUs would
also support DDR4-2133/2400/3200 memory. The wafer pictures reveal  3
combinations for the die of Xeon E7 v2.  Though ofcourse it goes without
saying thatthe best thing to go for in Ivy Bridge-EX are the RAS
features. Here is the configuration break down:

• 15 Cores, 37.5MB L3 Cache and 4.31 Billion Transistors with 541mm^2 Density.
• 10 Cores, 25 MB L3 Cache and 2.89 Billion Transistors with 341mm ^2 Density.
• 6 Cores, 15MB L3 Cache and 1.86 Billion Transistors with 257mm^2 Density.

Without any further ado, this is the lineup of the Ivy Bridge-EX ‘Xeon E7 v2′ Lineup: