With up to 18 cores and an array of data-driven software capabilities, the Xeon E5-2600 v3 marks one of the biggest leaps in Intel Corp.’s flagship server processor series yet. The new iteration raises the competitive bar beyond merely keeping up with Moore’s Law to addressing specific workload requirements down at the component level.

The E5-2600 v3, which made its debut at the Intel Developer Forum,  comes in 26 separate models designed to address an especially broad spectrum of use cases ranging from office computing to distribute data crunching. Added to the list are another 20 custom-ordered configurations that Intel claims to have already started shipping to select customers, whom it didn’t name but presumably include many familiar names from the hyperscale market, which has a known appetite for what Wikibon terms hyper-specialized hardware.

The new family represents Intel’s most serious attempt thus far at bringing some of that optimization down into the traditional enterprise data center.  The most expensive E5-2600 v3 chips can support up to 70 percent more virtual machines  than their predecessors, according to the company, which can add up to a lot of saved licensing costs in large organizations. Since hypervisor vendors such as VMware Inc. charge per core, the the denser the infrastructure, the less money a customer has to pay for software.

To top it off, the E5-2600 v3 introduces a built-in voltage regulator that allows each individual processor in a chip to set its own power level depending on the load, a feature that can also produce significant cost savings in large-scale environments. The family further cuts  electricity consumption through the use of DDR4 memory, which succeeds the DDR3 architecture used in the previous generation  series and provides increased data reliability with 35 percent greater efficiency.

The fourth-generation specification can also handle considerably more bandwidth, an improvement that Intel is exploiting with a new control that supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet and – continuing the power optimized theme – uses half the energy of its predecessor. Yet while the increased efficiency is a tremendous advantage in and of itself, Intel says that customers will not only be paying less for software licenses and electricity with the E5-2600 v3 but also get more back.

Every chip in the family comes fitted with thermal sensors for monitoring airflow and outlet temperature, a potentially powerful maintenance tool in the hands of operations professionals, and a brand new supporting chipset that can support three USB 3.0, eight USB 2.0 and 10 SATA3 slots. Also included in the package is compatibility with the NVMe protocol for connecting direct-attached flash cards.

Overall, the  E5-2600 v3 performs up to three time faster than the previous generation Xeon series and can handle six times as much throughput at half the latency. Combined with the value-added capabilities Intel has baked into the series, that makes for a powerful value proposition that puts the chipmaker in a that much better position to extend its dominance into the software-defined data center.

photo credit: mattwalker69 via photopin cc