Today we have spy shots of the yet-to-be-released Intel Broadwell-EP series processors. The Intel Xeon E5-2600 series has already seen three complete revisions. Starting with the Sandy Bridge-EP series (E5-2600 V1), moving to the 22nm Ivy Bridge-EP (E5-2600 V2) and onto the current generation Haswell-EP (E5-2600 V3) launched in September 2014. As one might expect, with Intel’s Broadwell architecture already shipping in quantity on the lower end single socket consumer/ server market, the dual socket variants are about to get an upgrade to V4.
For Intel, the Intel Xeon E5-2600 family is a huge revenue driver and is basically the de-facto server platform for storage, virtualization and other applications. Broadwell-EP will bring 14nm process technology to deliver more cores and lower power consumption. Other improvements such as TSX should be enabled with the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 V4 generation.
Looking at the physical form factor, we will see one very similar to today’s Haswell-EP processors. It is suspected that the V4 chips will work in most V3 platforms with a BIOS upgrade. This sample is from a software development firm but it does show a more robust heat spreader.
Underneath the processor we see many more small components inside the LGA2011-3 pin pad array.
We do expect different die sizes just like we have with the current batch of V3 processors. With 14nm production ramped up and Skylake coming soon, these processors should only be a few months off. While die shrinks tend to bring about more cores, we look to Skylake-EP for exciting new capabilities such as a rumored hex-channel memory controller.
no visible sign of the air core inductors at the bottom of the package ?
It would be nice if Intel were to take a complete and visible leadership role relative to their Xeon E5 2600 V4 CPU product line and produce a dual CPU workstation motherboard for the E5 2600 V4, unlike the omission seen with the E5 2600 V3. The lapse in complementary motherboard product line such as a dual CPU workstation motherboard, if I am not mistaken, being the first time since the introduction of the Intel Pentium Pro in the mid 1990’s. The current workstation motherboard by Intel, designed for the E5 2600 V2 and near the end of its product life cycle, being the very nice W2600CR2.
Creating an overclocking, standard width socket, dual E5 2600 V4 CPU motherboard supported by 8 DIMM memory slots per CPU. A motherboard with 10 PCIe slots (10 external, 2 internal) configured as follows: 4 [double width] x 16e, 4 x 8e [nested], 2 x 8e, 2 x 1i, incorporating a PLX like controller if necessary, 2 SATA 6G and 2 HD SAS 12G drive connectors as standard with the option to add a mezzanine RAID controller board that has 2 additional HD SAS connectors with 2GB cache, TOSLINK input and output, the motherboard communicating via 10g ether. The footprint (area) being increased in size from the W2600CR2 14.2″ x 15″ to approximately 14.9″ x 15″ or a tad shorter and wider than the Supermicro X10DRG-Q, 15.2″ x 13.2″ dual narrow ILM socket CPU motherboard.
Park McGraw