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posted by mattie_p on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-i-can-play-my-games-faster-right? dept.

Popeidol writes

"Intel has announced the latest revision to it's Enterprise CPU range. The Xeon E7 v2 is based on Ivy Bridge rather than the aging Westmere, and specifically targets the Big Data Analytics market. In pursuit of this they've bumped up the core count to 15, reduced power consumption, reworked the cache, and included a long list of smaller improvements. The end result is a high-reliability chip that uses less power but has dramatically improved performance for most workloads.

A single-page version of the article is available here."

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by hemocyanin on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:33PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:33PM (#4907) Journal

    15 -- that's an odd number

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by acid andy on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:44PM

      by acid andy (1683) on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:44PM (#4911) Homepage Journal

      Maybe they'll make the 16th one available later as a promotion. Buy 15 Get 1 Free or 6.66% Extra Free (the deal of the Beast).

      --
      Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
      • (Score: 2, Funny) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday February 23 2014, @09:52PM

        by TheGratefulNet (659) on Sunday February 23 2014, @09:52PM (#5331)

        overclocking and overbussing is very old.

        the new hotness is overcoring.

        hitting control-alt-shift-tab-backslash can turn on that extra cpu (if you have the right kernel patch).

        --
        "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    • (Score: 5, Funny) by dyingtolive on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:44PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:44PM (#4912)

      It's unusual too.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:46PM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:46PM (#4913) Homepage

      Something says they put 16 on, but expect one to be flawed, so do testing until they find the weak one, and disable it. (Nothing new about that, the old 486SXs were just DX's which had failed FPU tests, and had them disabled by e-fuse. I think AMD did some 3-core chips more recently which were 4-cores with the duff one disabled.)

      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:07PM

        by hemocyanin (186) on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:07PM (#4918) Journal

        Ah the memories -- I had a 486sx20 once upon a time. I thought it rocked too. You get more power in a feature phone nowadays.

        • (Score: 2, Interesting) by isostatic on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:13PM

          by isostatic (365) on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:13PM (#4933) Journal

          My SX25 fell by the wayside when I tried to get Windows 95 installed on it. Had to compress the hard drive too, as it was only 170MB. Replaced it with a DX4-100 then my first homebuilt PC - a P2-300

          When I buy servers now, I tend to spec low cores high CPU - x264 encoding is the only thing that really taxes what are in effect nas drives, currently that would be a single E5-2637 V2. 4 cores, 3.5GHz [intel.com]

          However most servers serve multiple people, and run multiple threads, and can make use of wide processors. My favoured vendor suggests putting some 12-core processors in. Even on the storage chasis I go for, with two physical processors, that's 24 cores, it's a phenominally wide system. I do wonder how many systems can make use of that number of cores, but can't be easilly parallelised onto multiple cheaper machines. 6x4 core machines are in most cases going to be cheaper than a 24 core machine.

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by kebes on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:21PM

        by kebes (1505) on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:21PM (#4920)
        Assuming the image in TFA [hothardware.com] is actually correct, the chip seems to have exactly 15 cores, arranged in 3 columns of 5 cores.

        You're of course right that manufacturers sell partially-functional chips at lower cost. So we will probably see cheaper versions of this chip (e.g. with only 12 of the cores enabled).
      • (Score: 1) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday February 23 2014, @09:05PM

        by TheGratefulNet (659) on Sunday February 23 2014, @09:05PM (#5317)

        aha - that must be what people mean by 'the intel sees damage and routes around it'.

        --
        "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    • (Score: 5, Funny) by mrbluze on Saturday February 22 2014, @09:56PM

      by mrbluze (49) on Saturday February 22 2014, @09:56PM (#4967) Journal

      Core 16 belongs to the NSA

      --
      Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
      • (Score: 1) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday February 23 2014, @09:08PM

        by TheGratefulNet (659) on Sunday February 23 2014, @09:08PM (#5319)

        and when it comes to transistors, "all your base are belong to us".

        you are free to use collectors and emitters as you see fit, though.

        (pullups are optional but recommended; especially for the obese).

        --
        "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Sunday February 23 2014, @11:49AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Sunday February 23 2014, @11:49AM (#5154) Journal
      15 allows a 3x5 layout, so it's not too bad from an architectural perspective. It's also quite nice for addressing, because you can use a 4-bit core address with a broadcast address for cache coherency messaging.
      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 1) by Jerry Smith on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:48PM

    by Jerry Smith (379) on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:48PM (#4914) Journal

    Maybe a general logic main controller PPE and 15 SPE subcores?

    --
    All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by visaris on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:57PM

      by visaris (2041) on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:57PM (#4915) Journal

      The cores are more or less equal to each other and attached to a high speed ring bus which is also their interface to the L3 cache and beyond.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by LookIntoTheFuture on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:25PM

    by LookIntoTheFuture (462) on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:25PM (#4921)

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

    I'm sorry. I am so sorry.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by mhajicek on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:22PM

      by mhajicek (51) on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:22PM (#4936)

      Yes, 15 rounds of .50 Beowulf would pack quite a bit of power.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by blackpaw on Saturday February 22 2014, @10:35PM

    by blackpaw (2554) on Saturday February 22 2014, @10:35PM (#4986) Journal

    Wonder how well it would work as a VM Host. A KVM cluster of these could serve a lot of VM's ...

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Angry Jesus on Sunday February 23 2014, @12:44AM

    by Angry Jesus (182) on Sunday February 23 2014, @12:44AM (#5025)

    I can't tell from the article - do all 15 core have their own FPU or did they copy AMD and share FPUs between multiple cores? That's great for databases but not so good for HPC, but then again many HPC systems will have GPUs for hardcore math.