Intel Announces Xeon E7 10-cores, 20 Threads

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Need more cores for serious business?

Intel has taken the wraps off of its new Xeon E7-8800/4800/2800 server processors for high-end computing applications, including business intelligence, real-time data analytics and virtualization.

Based on Intel's latest 32nm Sandy Bridge process technology, the new Xeon processors have up to 10 cores with Hyper-Threading, and deliver up to 40 percent greater performance than the previous Xeon 7500 series processor.

The new processor family contains 18 new processors for two-, four- and eight-socket servers, and is expandable to servers with 256 sockets. Intel boasts that a single Xeon processor E7-based server can replace a current 18 dual-core server.

For big tasks, Intel is offering 10 advanced 10-core versions of the chip, led by the E7-8870, E7-4870 and E7-2870, all of which reach 2.4 GHz with a TDP of 130 watts.

The company also announced a low voltage version as well as a frequency-optimized version. The 10-core low-voltage E7-8867L reaches 2.13 GHz with a TDP of 105 watts, while the eight-core frequency-optimized E7-8837 tops out at 2.67 GHz with a TDP of 130 watts.

Intel also added more affordable chip options in the Xeon E3-1200 family. The Xeon processor E7-8800/4800/2800 families range in price from $774 to $4,616 in quantities of 1,000. The Xeon processor E3-1200 family ranges in price from $189 to $612 in quantities of 1,000.

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Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
41 Comments Comment from the forums
  • joytech22
    I can't think of any reason why you would need so many cores, anything that needs that many cores for visual, animation and physics is better off using a GPU for anyway.

    Please, tell me what use of so many cores really is.

    On a side complaint, $4600 for a CPU when ordered in batches of 1000+?
    Intel would be making a BUCKET load off each CPU.

    Business as usual.
    Reply
  • Nexus52085
    joytech22I can't think of any reason why you would need so many cores, anything that needs that many cores for visual, animation and physics is better off using a GPU for anyway.Please, tell me what use of so many cores really is.On a side complaint, $4600 for a CPU when ordered in batches of 1000+?Intel would be making a BUCKET load off each CPU.Business as usual.
    Film composers use virtual instruments that really take advantage of multi-core processing, and sometimes 8 cores is still not enough. There are a lot of composers who buy 1-3 extra computers and use them as slaves in order to process all of the audio.
    Reply
  • LuckyDucky7
    Gotta beat out the 12-core AMD processors, I guess...
    Reply
  • nebun
    Nexus52085Film composers use virtual instruments that really take advantage of multi-core processing, and sometimes 8 cores is still not enough. There are a lot of composers who buy 1-3 extra computers and use them as slaves in order to process all of the audio.that's why we have GPU computing
    Reply
  • cjl
    GPU computing isn't the answer to everything. First, GPU computing doesn't help integer (it mainly helps floating point), so these will absolutely wipe the floor with GPUs for integer operations. Second, these are made for a completely different market - high end servers where reliability is critical. These aren't workstation or desktop CPUs - they're for large servers.
    Reply
  • philologos
    I'm pretty sure these are Westmere-EX processors and have nothing to do with Sandy Bridge.
    Reply
  • DoDidDont
    I use 3ds max and although there are render plug-ins that make use of Cuda technology, the use of the technology is still in its infancy. It has so many incompatibility problems with current material, lighting, and fx plug-ins. My current system has 24 CPU logical cores @ 3.06ghz, and 1024 Cuda cores using 2x GTX 580 phantom 3gb cards. Production rendering using Cuda cores and Iray is damn fast, and has greatly improved final render times when working on photo realistic architectural scenes, but the quality of the render takes time to match the render quality produced using mental ray using CPU cores, and you have to start a project completely from scratch using materials and lighting etc that you know will be compatible with the iray plug-in. Because of this, it makes it impossible to use Cuda technology for most of my work, as clients send me files using materials, lighting and plug-ins that do not work using iray, so for the time being, as many CPU cores as possible is a must for my work, and 3ds max makes use of all 24 CPU cores in production rendering. Production rendering with 24 CPU cores is still blisteringly fast. Nvidia claim that using their Cuda technology can be a lot faster than using Multi-core CPU’s, but that depends entirely on the system its being compared against, and the application being used. And another problem is power consumption. The two CPU’s I have installed, have a max TDP of 95w per CPU, the two GTX 580 cards have a max TDP of 488W, so there is still a lot of work to be done as far as getting GPU’s to be as power efficient as CPU’s. The Companies that are most likely to buy these new Xeon’s are large businesses that run massive data centres, server farms, and production studios, where low power consumption and reliability are critical, and GPU’s score very badly in this area. My system is prepared for the future, and I am very sure that one day when the use of Cuda technology has matured, that GPU production rendering will be more popular than CPU’s in this task, but that day is not yet, at least not in my line of industry. Iray also uses the combination of GPU and CPU technology together, so there is nothing wrong with having as many CPU cores and GPU cores in one system as possible.
    Reply
  • Check your facts, Tom's! These E7 processors are built on "previous generation" architecture. Here's the link from Intel to prove it:
    http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/04/05/performance-reliability-security-intel-xeon-processor-formula-for-mission-critical-computing?cid=rss-258152-c1-265964
    Reply
  • balister
    joytech22I can't think of any reason why you would need so many cores, anything that needs that many cores for visual, animation and physics is better off using a GPU for anyway.Please, tell me what use of so many cores really is.On a side complaint, $4600 for a CPU when ordered in batches of 1000+?Intel would be making a BUCKET load off each CPU.Business as usual.
    Two Words for what a processor like this is used for: Virtual Servers.

    With that many cores and enough memory, the one processor could effectively act a 10 different servers where you only need one core for the virtual server.

    Pretty much this is a heavy RoI/low TCO processor.
    Reply
  • lasaldude
    joytech22I can't think of any reason why you would need so many cores, anything that needs that many cores for visual, animation and physics is better off using a GPU for anyway.Please, tell me what use of so many cores really is.On a side complaint, $4600 for a CPU when ordered in batches of 1000+?Intel would be making a BUCKET load off each CPU.Business as usual.
    Ummm??? A Server? Duh!
    Reply