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The CPU for the Modern Data Center: Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v2 ‘Ivy Bridge-EP’ (Server Talk Episode 7)

Earlier this week we announced our release of the new generation of Intel® Xeon® E5 CPUs: E5-2600 v2 “Ivy Bridge-EP”. In contrast to our launch earlier in the year of E3 ‘Haswell’ single CPU systems, the E5 family is designed for dual socket servers and workstations. The new Ivy Bridge-EP series hits the market bringing a number of improvements in performance and efficiency, as well as some features that make it ideally suited to be the processing heart of the modern data center.

So what so great about the new Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 CPUs? Check out our podcast with ICC solutions engineer Andrew Brant and Intel product marketing specialist James Vogeltanz, covering:

  • An introduction to the E5s and where they fit in the Xeon lineup
  •  
  • New generation E5 version 2 (focus primarily on the main processors E5-2600 series)
  •  
  • What’s different in v2 from previous gen: more cores, more cache, faster memory, superior energy efficiency, etc.
  •  
  • Different verticals and applications to target with the new processors

Check out our E5-2600 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP based systems, or contact us today for more assistance in building your InfiniBand solution.

Continue reading for a brief text overview of the E5-2600 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP processors
With a message of “operational excellence” geared towards the modern data center, the E5 v2 series goes beyond simply high performance efficiency. Built upon a 22nm process, it provides the features and capabilities that allow data center managers to do more with constrained budgets, securely and effectively scale capacity as needed while maintaining a competitive total cost of ownership (TCO).

Application Acceleration
In today’s data center, it’s important for workloads to be easy to deploy, manage, and complete. Any technology attempting to fulfill the role of handling these workloads must be able to achieve this. In order to do this, the new Ivy Bridge-EP processors have increased their max core count by as much as 50% (up to 12 cores) over the previous generation. In addition last level (level 3) cache has increased to up to 30MB. Meanwhile, the maximum frequency has also increased to 3.5GHz base and 4GHz turbo.

Perhaps more significant are the improvements in memory and I/O (with full integration of PCIe 3.0). After all, improved computing power may enable you to complete tasks faster but if the flow of data cannot keep up with the speed of your computation than all you end up with are bottlenecks. With the improvements in throughput, the E5 v2 CPUs can handle the most compute intensive applications with ease.

Smart Power Efficiency and Management
Another major focus of the E5-2600 v2 series is being able to operate at highly efficient power levels, especially as computing infrastructure scales and becomes more distributed. Like the E3-1200 v3 Haswell CPUs, the new E5s include low power models that can run at sub-2GHz. In addition, the E5s include features to help proactively realize cost savings at multiple levels. This is particularly crucial in data centers, where power and cooling represent a significant operating cost and consideration. In addition, data storage will continue to grow over the coming years (some estimates expecting it double every two years). Technology that can reduce the cost per byte of storing, accessing, transferring, etc. that data will be come more and more important.

The E5 v2 family’s appeal to the modern data center is not only simply limited to energy efficient CPUs but also the fine grain power control available across multiple tiers of management (processor, server, rack, center). Intel provides various software tools which enable these controls via consoles to manage and optimize workload placement based on dynamic power usage insights. Energy efficiency alone yields an average of 30% superior performance across most standard CPUs, with the low power models attaining as high as 37% (vs. previous processors based on a 32nm process). With the advanced power management controls factored in, total cost of ownership (TCO) can be lowered by roughly 60%.

The CPU for the Modern Data Center: Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v2 ‘Ivy Bridge-EP’ (Server Talk Episode 7)

Earlier this week we announced our release of the new generation of Intel® Xeon® E5 CPUs: E5-2600 v2 “Ivy Bridge-EP”. In contrast to our launch earlier in the year of E3 ‘Haswell’ single CPU systems, the E5 family is designed for dual socket servers and workstations. The new Ivy Bridge-EP series hits the market bringing a number of improvements in performance and efficiency, as well as some features that make it ideally suited to be the processing heart of the modern data center.

So what so great about the new Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 CPUs? Check out our podcast with ICC solutions engineer Andrew Brant and Intel product marketing specialist James Vogeltanz, covering:

  • An introduction to the E5s and where they fit in the Xeon lineup
  •  
  • New generation E5 version 2 (focus primarily on the main processors E5-2600 series)
  •  
  • What’s different in v2 from previous gen: more cores, more cache, faster memory, superior energy efficiency, etc.
  •  
  • Different verticals and applications to target with the new processors

Check out our E5-2600 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP based systems, or contact us today for more assistance in building your InfiniBand solution.

Continue reading for a brief text overview of the E5-2600 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP processors
With a message of “operational excellence” geared towards the modern data center, the E5 v2 series goes beyond simply high performance efficiency. Built upon a 22nm process, it provides the features and capabilities that allow data center managers to do more with constrained budgets, securely and effectively scale capacity as needed while maintaining a competitive total cost of ownership (TCO).

Application Acceleration
In today’s data center, it’s important for workloads to be easy to deploy, manage, and complete. Any technology attempting to fulfill the role of handling these workloads must be able to achieve this. In order to do this, the new Ivy Bridge-EP processors have increased their max core count by as much as 50% (up to 12 cores) over the previous generation. In addition last level (level 3) cache has increased to up to 30MB. Meanwhile, the maximum frequency has also increased to 3.5GHz base and 4GHz turbo.

Perhaps more significant are the improvements in memory and I/O (with full integration of PCIe 3.0). After all, improved computing power may enable you to complete tasks faster but if the flow of data cannot keep up with the speed of your computation than all you end up with are bottlenecks. With the improvements in throughput, the E5 v2 CPUs can handle the most compute intensive applications with ease.

Smart Power Efficiency and Management
Another major focus of the E5-2600 v2 series is being able to operate at highly efficient power levels, especially as computing infrastructure scales and becomes more distributed. Like the E3-1200 v3 Haswell CPUs, the new E5s include low power models that can run at sub-2GHz. In addition, the E5s include features to help proactively realize cost savings at multiple levels. This is particularly crucial in data centers, where power and cooling represent a significant operating cost and consideration. In addition, data storage will continue to grow over the coming years (some estimates expecting it double every two years). Technology that can reduce the cost per byte of storing, accessing, transferring, etc. that data will be come more and more important.

The E5 v2 family’s appeal to the modern data center is not only simply limited to energy efficient CPUs but also the fine grain power control available across multiple tiers of management (processor, server, rack, center). Intel provides various software tools which enable these controls via consoles to manage and optimize workload placement based on dynamic power usage insights. Energy efficiency alone yields an average of 30% superior performance across most standard CPUs, with the low power models attaining as high as 37% (vs. previous processors based on a 32nm process). With the advanced power management controls factored in, total cost of ownership (TCO) can be lowered by roughly 60%.