Intel Launches Xeon E7-8800 and E7-4800 v3 Processor Families
As we’ve mentioned, the Xeon E7-8800 / 4800 v3 product families support both DDR3 and DDR4 memory technologies. Support for the two differing memory types comes by way of Intel’s C112 and C114 scalable memory buffers.
Intel Scalable Memory Buffer With DDR4 Installed
The C112 and C114 scalable memory buffer boards and chips are offered in a couple of different configurations. There’s a basic configuration that supports up to 2 DIMMs per channel, while the advanced configuration ups that number to 3 DIMMs per channel. When paired to the advanced C114 scalable memory buffer, each socket in a Xeon E7 machine can address up to 1.5TB. In an 8-socket system, that equates to a maximum of 12TB.
Depending on the workload, the new Xeon E7-8800 / 4800 v3 processors are showing significant performance improvements according to data provided by Intel. Although it is clocked somewhat lower, the 18 core E7-8890 v3 outruns the 15 core E7-4890 v2 across the board in multi-threaded workloads. In single-threaded workloads, the equivalent low-clocked v3 parts will likely offer somewhat lower performance assuming the application doesn’t take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of the v3 parts.
Performance-per-watt is also increased over the previous generation. In these tests (the data, again, was provided by Intel), the E7-8890 v3 performed roughly on-par with, or up to 33% better than the E7-4890 v2 in terms of performance-per-watt.
