#INTEL TICK TOCK HASWELL PLUS#
#INTEL TICK TOCK HASWELL SERIES#

In recent years, this shrinkage has allowed for more cores and 元 cache memory to be added to the die as well as other features. The tocks are when a new microarchitecture is rolled out and the ticks are when that microarchitecture is tweaked a little bit and then implemented on a new manufacturing process that shrinks the transistors. Intel employs what it calls a 'tick-tock' model in designing and manufacturing Xeon chips. But it seems likely that we will see a Xeon E5-4600 v3 if there is demand for a system that does not need all of the bells and whistles of a Xeon E7-4800 machines and that costs a lot less, too. McConnell was mum on the subject during our briefing. It is not clear if Intel will be doing a four-socket variant of the Haswell-EP chips, which is akin to a poor man's Xeon E7-4800. Now customers looking for a cheap chip do not have to make any sacrifices on I/O or memory. So with the Haswell Xeons, the 24 lines have been, for all practical purposes, converged. The two different families used different sockets as well, which complicated things for motherboard and server makers. Consequently, the Xeon EN chips also had lower prices.

For the past two generations, the EN chips were a variant of the EP parts that supported less memory, had fewer PCI-Express ports, only one QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) link between the sockets instead of two with the E5-2600s, and lower clock speeds.

#INTEL TICK TOCK HASWELL SERIES#

(The 2600 series Xeons are also known as the 'efficient performance' or EP variant of the chip, to use Intel's internal language.) But there is a reason for this diversity.Īs Eoin McConnell, Xeon E5 family product line manager, explained to EnterpriseTech at a pre-briefing in the chip maker's Oregon research facility, Intel has eliminated the Xeon E5-2400 EN series. The diversity of feeds and speeds and prices with the Haswell Xeon E5s is both wider and deeper than with the prior Ivy Bridge Xeon E5 v2 chips bearing the 2600 designation. Some such customers gave paid Intel to added instructions that only they can access, or have made other kinds of modifications, such as deep bin searching to run them overclocked. There is not just one Haswell Xeon E5 chip, but rather three different dies, and on top of this variety there are an unknown number of customized SKUs that large customers have commissioned. The Haswell Xeon E5 aimed at workstations will probably find a home in overclocked servers (you cannot overclock the standard server-designated Xeons) and of course any of the Xeon E5s can be used in a two-socket workstation.

#INTEL TICK TOCK HASWELL PLUS#

There are 26 different versions of the Haswell Xeon E5 processors that are aimed at two-socket servers plus one for workstations and two more for single-socket machines, but even those lines are a bit fuzzy. The interesting thing about this Haswell Xeon E5 launch is that it shows how Intel is not being driven so much by competition as it is by the increasingly diversifying needs of its customer base – both server makers and end users who commission their own machines from original design manufacturers and the needs of storage and networking gear makers, too. The Haswell Xeon E5s follow relatively fast on the heels of the 'Ivy Bridge' Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors announced a year ago.

The drumbeat of Moore's Law continues apace with the launch of the 'Haswell' generation of Xeon E5-2600 processors, the third generation to bear that name and to provide a decent bump in both single-thread performance and a big jump in overall system throughput for the workhorse two-socket servers that dominate the datacenter. Any company that bought racks of servers within the past six months is probably going to be annoyed this week.

Intel tick tock haswell