Recently the deals on the Intel Xeon E5-2670 have only been getting better almost on a daily basis. The processor pricing has fallen almost in half. The Intel Xeon E5-2670 is a 8 core, 16 thread processor that is dual socket capable. Base clocks for the Sandy Bridge-EP part are 2.6GHz with turbo frequencies up to 3.3GHz. The processor is a 32nm part and has a TDP of 115w which is easy for just about any chassis to cool. Here is the Intel ARK page for the chip.
These processors were used by a major Web 2.0 player that is having OCP platforms decommissioned. This is very similar to what we saw with the Dell PowerEdge C6100‘s that Facebook decommissioned in the 2012/2013 time frame. That time there is one major difference: the C6100 is designed to be a “normal” server. With the latest decommissioning the platforms were more of a custom OCP style. These OCP platforms are significantly harder to re-use as they lack features like IPMI for remote KVM-over-IP like the Dell PowerEdge C6100 had. Many recyclers are simply pulling the processors and memory and scrapping the systems. OCP seems not to be so green post-use as the re-use cases are much slimmer for these machines.
Here is a link to the latest ebay Intel Xeon E5-2670 pricing: ebay Intel Xeon E5-2670 search results (sorted by lowest price first).
Monday October 12 the pricing was around $200 a chip. A month ago it was around $300 per chip. Today’s best pricing at the time of this writing is around $179. We do expect these prices to fall even further, much like we saw with the Dell PowerEdge C6100 generations Xeon L5520 and L5638/ L5639/ L5640’s.
Over the past few months DDR3 RDIMM pricing has similarly started to fall (significantly.) This is to the point that the pricing of complete E5 V1 systems is now starting to become highly attractive compared to the previous 5500/ 5600 series especially given the increase in compute power moving from a maximum of 6C/ 12T in the LGA1366 platform to these 8C/ 16T Xeon E5 generation parts. Likewise, moving to quad channel RAM means more bandwidth and more physical DIMM capacity which in turn allows one to add more RAM.
We last benchmarked the chips in 2013 which you can see here: Intel Xeon E5-2670 benchmarks. They are certainly capable processors.
Check the Great Deals Forum for more information.
 processors keep getting better as pricing is falling rapidly over the past few weeks){kind=link}
Would love to hear what kind of idle and low-usage power draw people are getting from 2P boards with this chip. It’s a 115W processor, just curious about how well it can idle down. My naive feel is that the Haswell chips really did amazing things w/r/t lower power states, but perhaps that’s a mis-estimation.