Although STH normally covers the server and high-end workstation market, there is a segment of the single-socket server market that traditionally follows desktop parts. Today the new 8th Gen Intel Core series CPUs have been launched for the consumer market.
As part of the announcement, there were two Intel Xeon E-2100M series SKUs announced. We were told by the server marketing team that there is no new server announcement and that these are mobile parts. We will say that Intel has a several decade-long history of releasing new CPUs in existing segments. One of those existing segments is the Intel Xeon E3-1200 and E3-1500 segment.
New 8th Gen Intel Core and Intel Xeon E-2100M CPUs
The slide that should raise some eyebrows is the new 8th Gen Intel Core Performance mobile processors slide from the Intel briefing deck. You can see that the Intel Core i9 and Core i7 8th generation processors are reaching 6 cores and 12 threads along with clock speeds of up to 4.8GHz. That is an amazing amount of performance.
The other takeaway is that the new Intel Xeon Entry level naming conventions are being used. Here the Intel Xeon E-2186M and Xeon E-2176M CPUs are also 6 cores 12 threads with 4.4-4.8GHz maximum turbo clocks. These are essentially the mobile Xeon E3 series replacements for higher-end workstation notebooks. As we saw the Xeon “E5” designation retire with Xeon Scalable, we expect the “E3” moniker to change to E- for entry-level servers.
As we discussed in many of our reviews, the mobile Xeon parts are essentially like their consumer counterparts with ECC UDIMM support. In fact, we asked Intel if this is the new Intel Xeon Entry level launch, but we were told it is not. Our sense: the mobile team is launching and just added the “Xeon” parts to the mix.
Beyond the high-performance parts, there are 28W TDP U-series parts that are dual or quad core with hyper-threading.
Finally, there are a few new desktop processors being launched including 6 core / 6 thread models and T series parts.
Why this matters to STH readers, aside from their notebook uses, is that these will likely be similar to the next-generation entry-level Xeons.
A bit of a rant here:
I have a Dell Precision 5520 with Xeon E3-1505M v6.
The performance is absolutely dreadful.
The cpu heats up to even 96 C and then it slows down.
The Windows 10 I’m using hangs, mouse and keyboard become unresponsive.
I have to wait even a minute to be able to work.
And all I do is compile code.
@Daniel, sounds more like a problem with the specific laptop. Buddy of mine has the same laptop and it works like a charm, maybe your CPU cooling block isn’t connected properly or making full contact?
Maybe a fan isn’t spinning up? Might be worth checking.
@Daniel notebookcheck.net found that the 5520 does not have enough cooling to run multi-core during sustained load so the CPU is throttled heavily. If you’re not using it mobile it will help significantly to put it on a cooling pad.
the new 2018 XPS 15 and Latitude 7490 both have a much improved cooling solution, and I would expect a new Precision 5530 to follow with the same improvement in a few months. Perhaps it’s worth complaining to your vendor or to do a trade in.
On Windows 10 you can avoid the hanging behavior by switching to the “Recommended or Better Performance” power profile rather than using the “Best Performance” setting.
Cooling is certainly a design challenge for notebooks these days. That is more of a vendor and model specific concern. Others here have some good comments. I am typing this on a HP Zbook Studio G3 with a Xeon E3-1545M V5 + Quadro M1000M so I am certainly one to try mobile Xeon parts. On heavy compiles, I generally just do them on a server since it is faster anyway.