Intel launches Xeon E7-8894 v4 flagship processor at 8898 USD

Intel on Thursday revealed a new flagship in their Xeon processor portfolio. The Xeon E7-8894 v4 aka Broadwell-EX will get 24 processor cores with a 2.4 GHz baseclock with a max turbo at 3.6 GHz for some cores. This puppy will cost you 8898 US dollars.

By releasing this new SKU Intel raised the clock frequency with precisely 200 MHz (compared to the previous flagship E7-8890 v4). The maximum possible turbo clock remains 3.6 GHz. The processor itself has a TDP of 165 watts. That's 1724 US dollars extra for the 200 MHz raised clock frequency. There's what little competition invokes.

Press release:

Intel today extended the performance capabilities of the Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8800 v4 product family with the addition of a high-performance SKU in the processor family’s Advanced SKU stack. The new SKU delivers the processor family’s highest performance to handle the most demanding, mission-critical enterprise workloads.

Businesses can use Intel Xeon processor E7-8894 v4-based servers to derive faster insights from the unprecedented amount of data being generated to create new services and improve customer experiences.

The Intel Xeon processor E7-8894 v4 combines high memory capacity and compute performance to deliver quicker results and improved productivity. The processor is targeted at scale-up workloads such as large databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), online transaction processing (OLT) and in-memory analytics. The ability to scale-up allows more resources (more sockets and more memory) to be added to a single node image.

Since its introduction in June 2016, the 14nm-based Intel Xeon processor E7-8800/4400 v4 family has delivered sustained and sizable improvements in instructions-per-cycle (IPC). Architectural and process improvements since Westmere EX E7-8800 processor family deliver up to 3.69x performance gains compared to the previous generation1,2, which provide enterprises an opportunity for refresh and TCO optimization through server consolidation. Intel continues to push innovation and process improvements with Intel Xeon processor E7-8894 v4, which has captured several record-breaking results based on key performance benchmarks, including SAP SD 2-Tier, SPECjbb*2015, SPECcpu2006, LINPACK and SAP BW edition on SAP HANA*.

To meet the increasing demands for 24x7x365 days availability and uptime for mission-critical systems, the processor has RAS capabilities on Intel® Run Sure Technology. These features are unique to the Intel Xeon processor E7 E7-8800 v4 family to reduce unplanned downtime, increase data integrity and reduce costs associated with lost revenue and service/maintenance.

The Intel Xeon processor E7-8894 v4  supports 4 to 8 sockets (up to 32 sockets via node controller) with configurations supporting up to 24 processing cores and up to 24 terabytes (TB) of memory per socket to boost in-memory analytics and achieve actionable insights in real-time.