Report: Intel Ivy Bridge EX Will Sport Up to 15 Cores
This year Intel's 'Brickland' platform is to arrive, starting with Ivy Bridge-EX and continuing on to Haswell-EX and later Broadwell-EX server CPUs.
Rumor has it that
Intel's highest offering in the Ivy Bridge-EX lineup will come packed with a generous 15 processing cores. Alongside that, the CPU will carry 30MB of L3 Cache and will be based on the Brickland platform. Within Intel's previous offerings, its chip with the highest core count ran up to 10 processing cores on its flagship Westmere-EX CPU.
The new Brickland based server CPUs will be split up into two series: The Ivy Bridge-EX 'Xeon E7' parts, and the Ivy Bridge-EP 'Xeon E5' parts. While the EP lineup will pack from 6 - 10 cores, the EX lineup will start at 10 cores and come packed with up to 15 cores. The latter lineup will include the E7-8800 V2, E7-4800 V2, E7-2800 V2 parts. The EP lineup will include the E5-4600 V2 chip.
The new EX CPUs will also be able to support ECC DDR3-1600 and DDR4-2133/2400/3200 memory. No, your eyes are not mistaken, DDR4 might finally start to see daylight.
If high end server hardware doesn't interest you, the following might:
Intel has announced that its Ivy Bridge-E HEDT (High End Desktop) lineup may benefit from a higher core count, indicating that entry level CPUs will feature at least 6 cores, and higher end models might feature up to 8 or 10 processing cores. It is rumored that the Sandy Bridge-E i7 3980X might hit shelves not too far from now, which may become Intel's first native 8 core desktop CPU.
I don't see anything in the article about threads. My bet is it is more than likely there will be 30-threads available.
I don't see anything in the article about threads. My bet is it is more than likely there will be 30-threads available.
In my case, this would be for 1080p and 4k video editing...... not checking email.
Very glad to see DDR4 coming out as well, while ram does not bottleneck games, it is most definitely the slow point on some higher end business and server applications. Also the higher density that DDR4 brings means either less dimms needed, or more Ram available to a system. Hopefully too we will see DDR4 drop in price like a rock so that we can see it come out in phones in a year or two. DDR4's major focus was on power usage and density, so maybe we will be able to see some 2-4GB ram phones that can still keep some decent battery life.
I would imagine the odd core count is exactly a yield issue. I mean, imagine the size of that die! That has got to be a monster! Getting a full 16 cores is probably rare enough that they would just use them in house when one happens to work out that way. Another interesting thought is that this is using some of the tech used in (I think it was called) Knights Corner where you had 'backup' CPU cores, and if one failed then you essentially had a hot spare to take it's place on the fly, preventing the need for down time, or for Intel to bother sending your a whole new chip.
sorry, I meant to quote P05esto
most likely Q3
My guess is that they can now fit 3 rows of 5 cores in the package due to the die shrink.
Is there a technical reason ?
Their hexa-cores weren't 2^n, and really there is no reason to be.
Or the huge front-end, back-end, and cache on the die means that a square number of cores isn't needed. (the scheduler probably takes as much room as the 16th core)
Most software today hardly makes significant use of even a 2nd core. The number of "consumers" who genuinely need more than a quad-core is likely well under 1% of that market. Considering that the die size will be 3-4X that of i7-3770, that means 3-4X the risk of defects per die and also much fewer dies per wafer on top of much higher wafer edge losses. It does not make much sense to manufacture "consumer" CPUs that are so expensive that 'consumers' cannot afford them.
I wouldn't quite call LGA2011 boards/CPUs "consumer" since they are more than half-way into Xeon territory.
The main reason why digital things tend to scale with powers of two is simply that adding an extra bit in addressing/arbitration logic doubles the number of possible outcomes and that makes doubling everything else the most intuitive way forward from a digital engineering perspective.
Between May 27th and June 4th, if rumors are to be believed. Though actual product launch day is apparently June 2nd. That's like...just between Q2 and Q3, though that depends on Intel's financial year...
Single core performance is king, expanding to more cores should be a last resort for more computing power