Intel Launches 18-core Xeon E7 v3 Series Processors

Intel Corporation today announced the Intel Xeon processor E7-8800/4800 v3 product families. Xeon E7 v3 chips boast up to 18 dual-threaded cores and up to 45MB of L3 cache.

The launch shows many new processors all based on the flagship Xeon part which is a beast in terms of specifications that include 18 cores, 45 MB of L3 cache, a die size of 662 mm2 and a total of 5.6 billion transistors.

The need to rapidly extract actionable insight from large volumes of data is driving demand for new technologies for in-memory computing and big data analytics. Considering the current and future demand for in-memory computing, Gartner believes that revenue in this market will exceed $9.5 billion by year-end 2018, and at least 50 percent of large organizations will adopt in-memory computing to enable digital business strategies.

Intel Haswell-EX Xeon E7 V3 Processors Lineup:

"In the digital services economy, success or failure can depend on how quickly businesses act on insight from vast stores of data," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel. "The Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family is the engine for accelerating business intelligence through real-time analytics, enabling businesses to improve customer satisfaction through more personalized products and services, generate new revenue streams and enhance operational efficiency."

• With 20 new performance world records across a broad range of mission-critical applications, the new processor family achieves a 40 percent average performance improvement compared to the prior generation.
• The processor family delivers up to 6x improvement in business processing application performance for in-memory transactional workloads optimized with the new Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel TSX).
• With up to 18 cores, a 20 percent increase in cores compared to the prior generation, and up to 45 megabytes of last-level cache, the processor family can deliver up to 70 percent more decision support analytic sessions per hour.
• Product family delivers up to 10x greater performance per dollar while driving up to an 85 percent lower total cost of ownership compared to alternative RISC architectures by reducing the cost of hardware acquisition and power and cooling.
• The processors support configurations up to 32 sockets with support for the industry's largest memory capacity per socket (8-socket systems are capable of supporting up to 12 terabytes of DDR3 or DDR4 memory technology).
• New security and reliability capabilities, including increased cryptographic performance via the latest Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI), as well as additional micro-architectural improvements. Intel Run Sure Technology, a unique set of reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features for the Intel Xeon processor E7 family, is enhanced with new features designed to further ensure "five nines" availability for mission-critical applications.
• Product family comprises 12 processor models, including multiple segment optimized processors such as two high-frequency models that are designed for a subset of database applications requiring the fastest cores available.
• Starting today, 17 system manufacturers from around the world will begin announcing Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family-based platforms. These manufacturers include Bull, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, Oracle, PowerLeader, Quanta, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro and ZTE.
• (Editor's note: Intel and Cloudera today announced details on how the partnership is successfully driving enterprise adoption of analytics at scale, including new product enhancement such as the implementation of Intel AES-NI that delivers a 2.5x improvement in encryption off-load performance, enabling an entire Hadoop data set to be encrypted with a system overhead ranging from 1 to 4 percent depending on the workload.)

Transforming Businesses through Real-Time Analytics
Nippon Paint, one of the largest paint suppliers in Asia, is currently using Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 running SAP HANA in-memory analytics software to capture consumer behaviors with greater accuracy and accelerate its ability to analyze and act on data for optimized supply chain and marketing campaigns.

"Through real-time analytics, Nippon Paint is able to capture and analyze customer preferences such as colors, design styles and designers, and tailor products and services to specific customer needs," said Justin Chen, CIO, Nippon Paint. "Actionable data that used to take days and weeks to analyze and report on is now available in near real time. We're currently testing with new Intel Xeon processor E7 v3-based systems to take advantage of the higher performance and reliability features to further accelerate data-driven customer insight."

Pricing Details
The Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 product family will be offered with 12 different processor models that range in price from $1,224 to $7,175 in quantities of 1,000.