Perhaps the least suspenseful server CPU release on our radar for 2017 is the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V6 series. The desktop parts have already launched and so the Intel Kaby lake refresh to the low-end Intel Xeon line is anticipated. Intel marketing is even calling these V6 because we are now on our sixth generation of Xeon E3-1200 quad-core parts (or seventh if you include the X3000 series.)
Leaked Intel Xeon E3-1220 V6 Benchmarks
Here is a link to the SiSoft Sandra 2015 results for the Intel Xeon E3-1220 V6. We are also going to take a screenshot in the event the results disappear.
From the posted results we see a 3.0GHz CPU with 6MB L3 cache. We actually use the E3-1220 Vx CPUs quite often as they are lower cost parts that work well in storage builds and for applications that cannot use hyper-threading. We do think that the impending AMD Ryzen/ Naples launches will have implications on the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V6 series, however we still have a few weeks until we will start getting results.
Being clear, this was not one of our test platforms. We do not post our benchmarks onto public listing services and we use Linux for server CPUs. We also use extremely controlled benchmark platforms. Our next-generation of Linux-Bench already has over 12,000 validation runs on 30 different architectures to validate that we can get consistent benchmarks with proper scaling to within a +/- 0.5% margin. You can see the need for this as we are now testing small clusters of servers for power consumption differences based on cooling. You can see the need for this in our 2U 4-node system testing methodology and one example of this in our Supermicro BigTwin review.
The Intel Xeon E3-1200 line has become ever more marginalized as the Intel Atom C2000 / C3000 series and Intel Xeon D-1500 series provide more cores at a lower clock speed. Intel desperately needs to re-vamp the Intel Xeon E3-1200 series as almost four years later the Intel Xeon E3-1220 V6 offers little compelling reason to upgrade over an Intel Xeon E3-1220 V3 CPU.
