Intel Xeon E5-2637 Question

[FJR-89]

I came across this on Scan and I was wondering what the deal with it is?

The thing costs £700 and has two hyperthreaded cores and 5MB L3 cache, for half of that I could get a 6 core, why is this so expensive, what is so special about it to cost that much?

So confusing.

[Bonebreaker777]

Maybe because it is into a two CPU system? Otherwise it just looks like a premium i3 with Turbo.
Well premium price wise.

[scaryjim]

It's a Xeon?

Given Intel's tendency to enable and disable features pretty much at random, the Xeon's are pretty much the only way to get certain features guaranteed. Since Intel never did any s2011 consumer CPUs in dual-core, it's hard to get an exact comparison, but for a hint of the differences here's an ark link comparing it to the lowest desktop s2011 CPU, and a Sandy Bridge Core i3, to give you a couple of reference points: http://ark.intel.com/compare/64598,63698,53428

The biggest difference is obviously the memory: desktop SB-E can only address 64GB, while the Xeon can address 750GB of RAM, as well as having ECC support baked in. There's a few of other features there, like V-Pro and Trusted Execution, 8GT/s QPI with 2 QPI links (needed for a 2p system), and PCIe 3.0. If you want any of those features, you have to buy the Xeon...

EDIT: probably also worth noting that it's very highly clocked for an 80W server part, so it fills a niche: it's the right choice for a dense server environment where your load is largely serialised so you want fast cores not lots of cores. Server components are all about meeting different requirements for different workloads, and once you're looking at niche markets you can pretty much charge what you want

[FJR-89]

Cool, thanks

[Bonebreaker777]

Could ever a dual-core system efficiently address 750GB of RAM while using is a well and if yes, what for?

[scaryjim]

Dunno, depends entirely on your use case. If Intel make one, then I'd guess there is a market for it, but I'm nowhere near enough of an expert in comupting patterns to know exactly what. I guess there must be some analytic techniques that perform linear processes on very large datasets - anything iterative where the next iteration depends on the outcome of the last would have to be programmed serially, so you'd want a few very fast threads to get best performance.

[phil4]

Don't forget certain software is licensed by the core. As an example we have 4 core's of license for SQL 2012. As such any server we buy will be at most 4 cores. This quite often we'll want the fastest 4 core Xeon CPU we can buy, 6 or more cores is not an option.

I think there are many more companies with similar niche issues, and as such fortunately intel make lots of niche CPUs to help with this.

Just a thought.

[Bonebreaker777]

All interesting and valid thoughts. Luckily I don't have to deal with this kind of problems while doing my personal things.