At ISC 16, Intel formally launched the Intel Xeon E5-4600 V4 series of processors. The systems were allowed to be announced during the Intel Xeon E7 V4 launch a few weeks ago, as we saw with Dell’s announcement. We confirmed with Intel at that time and we were not allowed to discuss processor specifics. As of this week, the processors have been officially launched.
The Intel Xeon E5-4600 V4 family of processors is meant to be a scale-up version of the Intel Xeon E5-2600 V4 family. The chips are also based on the “Broadwell” generation of processors. Intel has had a cadence of launching the E5-2600 line, the E7 line then the E5-4600 line in that order for a few years now so this release was expected. If you were reading your favorite (non-STH) tech site this week, odds are you did not see any news on the launch as the CPUs generally feature a very low PR launch profile.
Intel Xeon E5-4600 V4 Family Details and Comparison
The Intel Xeon E5-4600 V4 family is a drop-in replacement for the E5-4600 V3 family. We expect platforms to simply require a BIOS update to allow access to the new chips. Although upgrades are unlikely, it does mean that there are few new product launches around these processors.
The ten SKUs range from 8 cores/ 16 threads and up to 22 cores/ 44 threads. There is also a 10 core / 10 thread part without hyper-threading. For many of the workloads that these processors deal with licensing costs for software can easily eclipse hardware costs by several fold. That means that the processor SKUs are often optimized to provide value running specific workloads. For example, the Intel Xeon E5-4655 V4 is an 8 core / 16 thread part but has high frequencies. This is good for applications that have a high per-core licensing model. Also, the systems that these processors come in are generally five or more figures in terms of pricing. What that means from a practical perspective is that discounts tend to be higher in high list price/ high discount transactions.
The Intel Xeon E5-4600 V4 family will likely supplant the V3 generation over the next month or two in new systems. The family offers more memory performance and PCIe lanes than the Intel Xeon E7 series however those looking at 4 socket systems often find the E7 line to be attractive given its memory capacity and scaling to 8 sockets.
