Report: Intel Ivy Bridge EX Will Sport Up to 15 Cores

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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.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

50 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ilysaml
    15 Cores? And 15 Threads? 30 MB L3 Cache? WTF?
    Reply
  • wiyosaya
    ilysaml15 Cores? And 15 Threads? 30 MB L3 Cache? WTF?I don't see anything in the article about threads. My bet is it is more than likely there will be 30-threads available.
    Reply
  • Jerky_san
    Wonder why the odd number? Easier yields or something?
    Reply
  • jn77
    Its about time consumers are getting 8 core Intel CPU's but it is sad that they won't make a consumer 15 core processor available yet.

    In my case, this would be for 1080p and 4k video editing...... not checking email.
    Reply
  • p05esto
    Bragging rights for me, I want to check 70 email accounts at once.
    Reply
  • juan83
    cool.. but what about prices? i mean, in 2 or 3 years from now, 4 cores would be as cheap as 2 cores now? i hope so, otherwise 100 cores are useless, simply i can't afford them.. :(
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    This is super exciting! 15 cores and probably 30 threads is an incredable amount of horsepower in a single chip. And as server boards can typically do 2 CPUs then you are talking about 60 threads of raw multitasking power! Phenominal!

    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.
    jn77Its about time consumers are getting 8 core Intel CPU's but it is sad that they won't make a consumer 15 core processor available yet.In my case, this would be for 1080p and 4k video editing...... not checking email.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.
    Reply
  • nino_z
    The question is - where are the new CPUs coming out. I wanna build a new pc soon and hate waiting too long.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    @jn77
    sorry, I meant to quote P05esto
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    nino_zThe question is - where are the new CPUs coming out. I wanna build a new pc soon and hate waiting too long.most likely Q3
    Reply