Today is the release of the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V5 family. The new Greenlow platform supports the Intel C236 chipset and is the first Intel Xeon E3-1200 part to support the 14nm Skylake architecture. Since the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V4 family, Intel has transitioned the E3-1200 line from its low power microserver platform to more of a workstation counterpart of the desktop Core i7 family. There are a total of 11 new processors launched today, four of which have onboard Intel HD graphics. Tray pricing ranges from $193 to $612. The Intel Xeon E3-1200 V5 generation features all 4 core models (no more dual core parts) and 8 of the 11 parts feature Hyper-Threading. This was a highly anticipated launch of the LGA socketed Skylake Xeons as we saw the BGA versions release for the mobile segment a few weeks ago.
Intel Xeon E3-1200 V5 specifications
One can look at the Intel ARK page for full specs, however here is the basic comparison chart. We highlighted the main differences and added some bars for scale. DDR4 is now supported using non-ECC or ECC unbuffered DIMMs with up to 16GB/ DIMM. With the traditional dual channel memory and 2 DIMMs per channel this yeilds a 64GB maximum memory configuration.
One will very quickly notice that the 80w TDP Intel Xeon E3-1280 V5, E3-1270 V5, E3-1240 V5, E3-1230 V5 and E3-1220 V5 all use a lot of power for the amount of compute we expect out of them. At the low end, an E3-1220 V5 v. a Broadwell-DE Intel Xeon D-1520 would be a tough sell given its much higher TDP and likely similar performance (Braodwell-DE has Hyper-Threading). We hope to get chips to test soon.
The Greenlow platform now supports up to eight SATA 3.0 ports, up from six on the previous generation C226 chipset.
Overall platform is designed more for desktop/ low-end workstation first, server duty second. Although Intel can now support PCIe 3.0 off of the chipset (through he DMI Gen 3 interface) the number of lanes per CPU is still not overly impressive, especially as we will see the transition from SATA SSDs to PCIe/ NVMe SSDs over the next 12 months.
Hopefully we will get chips soon to test. We will have motherboard and server announcements from various vendors this week, however we are seeing a trend emerge. There is a heavy bias towards more workstation looking motherboards rather than server motherboards which gives us a clue as to where the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V5 is being positioned.
Stay tuned for more to come.
