Intel launches Xeon E7 v3 processors with up to 18 cores

[HEXUS]

Said to offer 40 per cent performance improvement over previous generation.

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[3dcandy]

18 cores and HT for 36 threads

[LSG501]

I'm all for more cores but when you do the sums and include things like overheads etc then the 18 cores aren't actually that much faster than an 8 core cpu with higher clocks (ie desktop haswell-e), ignoring xeon/versus desktop obviously.

Unless you're running '18 things' that only use 1 core or need some xeon only feature (not that many if any)the odds are that in most scenarios you wouldn't actually notice any real difference.

It just doesn't make sense to me financially but then I'm not a big business who likes to spend money lol

[shaithis]

These are for servers and extreme workstation loads...which you can probably guess from "$7,175 in quantities of 1,000."

Having 1 server with 4 x 16 cores in is going to draw a lot less power, occupy less space and cost less to cool then 4 servers with 16 cores in each server.

Or they might be able to turn the advanced physics back on in BF4 if you had one of these

[aidanjt]

I'm all for more cores but when you do the sums and include things like overheads etc then the 18 cores aren't actually that much faster than an 8 core cpu with higher clocks (ie desktop haswell-e), ignoring xeon/versus desktop obviously.

You're applying Windows desktop logic to servers which run many extremely parallel processes, or indeed, many many virtual servers. 18 cores turboboosting up to 3.3GHz is some serious performance.

[LSG501]

You're applying Windows desktop logic to servers which run many extremely parallel processes, or indeed, many many virtual servers. 18 cores turboboosting up to 3.3GHz is some serious performance.

I'm actually using high end 3D workstation logic....it's what I work with day in day out

They won't be turbo boosting in 90% of scenarios and like I said unless you're running '18 things' that use just one core then you'll likely not notice any real difference, the higher core clock of the 8 core would 'make up the difference' over the 18 core in essence.

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm actually using high end 3D workstation logic....it's what I work with day in day out

They won't be turbo boosting in 90% of scenarios and like I said unless you're running '18 things' that use just one core then you'll likely not notice any real difference, the higher core clock of the 8 core would 'make up the difference' over the 18 core in essence.

I think these things are mainly aimed at virtualisation environments. Imagine a VMware server running 100 virtual servers. Finding enough work to occupy 36 threads is pretty easy.

[shaithis]

They won't be turbo boosting in 90% of scenarios and like I said unless you're running '18 things' that use just one core then you'll likely not notice any real difference, the higher core clock of the 8 core would 'make up the difference' over the 18 core in essence.

You don't have to run n-"number of things". You can also run one or more things that are heavily multi-threaded. Like video encoding (you must be impatient to spend 10 grand on a video encoding system though!), MATLAB and servers (SQL for instance).

As others have said, virtualisation is also an extremely good use for 18 cores, along with the oodles of RAM you can put in these server/workstation boards.

[AlexKitch]

I often wonder if there's a case to be made for using these processors for desktop use.

Gaming is probably a bit of a no-go area, but for someone like me that has a *lot* of concurrent threads on the go and development across virtual machines, I do wonder if a workstation CPU would actually work better.

[DanceswithUnix]

I often wonder if there's a case to be made for using these processors for desktop use.

Gaming is probably a bit of a no-go area, but for someone like me that has a *lot* of concurrent threads on the go and development across virtual machines, I do wonder if a workstation CPU would actually work better.

Depends on the workload. At work we have big 6 core Xeon workstations for huge software compile jobs, but even though you can compile 50 source files in parallel there are still enough times where the system is waiting for a library to finish linking or a makefile to find the next bit of work that single threaded performance is still critical so 6 cores at 3.5GHz is going to be faster than 12 cores at 2.5GHz. In fact, oodles of RAM so that disk IO can be avoided is even more important than CPU speed.

[devBunny]

To "rapidly extract actionable insight" you need cores. It's very much a more-than-3D process.

And one that you and I have been doing all our lives. :-D

[abaxas]

18 cores/processors is nothing in the real world. Loads of work/jobs are already parallel compatible. The only thing that makes it a bit different is having that many cpu cores in one package.

If anything it's the wintel world catching up to the turn of the century.

[CampGareth]

I often wonder if there's a case to be made for using these processors for desktop use.

Gaming is probably a bit of a no-go area, but for someone like me that has a *lot* of concurrent threads on the go and development across virtual machines, I do wonder if a workstation CPU would actually work better.

I don't know about you but 4 cores for gaming and another 4 or so for video processing (twitch) sounds good to me. Then one spare core for teamspeak or something. I'm staring at 4 socket AMD systems, 64 cores for sensible money makes me excited though I have no idea what I'd use them for and because of AMD's performance per clock cycle it'd be a bit naff for gaming.

Seriously if you want cores, AMD is the way to go, 16 of them for £300 on ebay. Motherboards aren't that much more expensive. If you wanted a similar number of cores with Intel you're looking at thousands of pounds.

[GuidoLS]

I often wonder if there's a case to be made for using these processors for desktop use.

Gaming is probably a bit of a no-go area, but for someone like me that has a *lot* of concurrent threads on the go and development across virtual machines, I do wonder if a workstation CPU would actually work better.

Depends on the workload. At work we have big 6 core Xeon workstations for huge software compile jobs, but even though you can compile 50 source files in parallel there are still enough times where the system is waiting for a library to finish linking or a makefile to find the next bit of work that single threaded performance is still critical so 6 cores at 3.5GHz is going to be faster than 12 cores at 2.5GHz. In fact, oodles of RAM so that disk IO can be avoided is even more important than CPU speed.

Think 12TB of direct memory access sort of covers the oodles of ram situation. And the cost would probably cover the national debt, but that's a different topic...