Intel has officially abandoned its tick-tock model and made more modest progress in desktop performance. This means the company must adopt increasingly complex strategies to meet market demands, but that doesn't stop it from reinforcing its position in data centers. Its latest move is the fourth generation of the Xeon E5-2600 series, which includes a model with 22 physical cores and 44 processing threads.
The simple fact that Intel has retired its tick-tock method in favor of the new PAO (Process-Architecture-Optimization) confirms something we already knew: Future processors will be much more complicated to manufacture. The main shortcut is to increase the number of cores and place more work on parallel processing, but software must respond accordingly. Several latest-generation games can no longer be run on platforms with fewer than four cores (or alternatively, four processing threads), but data centers tell a different story. With increasing pressure on the cloud and the services it contains, achieving a higher level of efficiency is critical, and that requires new hardware.
The Xeon E5-2600 V4 Series
This is how we find the fourth generation of the Xeon E5-2600 series. Intel offers more than a dozen processors with that name, and its flagship model is the Xeon E5-2699 V4. This CPU based on the Broadwell architecture has a frequency of 2.2 GHz, 100 MHz less than its previous-generation equivalent, but in exchange it increases the number of physical cores to 22, when the E5-2699 V3 offers a maximum of 18. This also represents an increase in the amount of L3 cache (55 MB to be precise), while the total L2 is 5.5 megabytes (22 x 256 KB). With the intervention of Hyper-Threading technology, the Xeon E5-2699 V4 can process up to 44 threads, but it is most likely to be installed in pairs, meaning we are talking about 88 threads in a traditional configuration.
What About Your Desktop?
Could someone have such a processor on their desktop? Technically yes, since there are motherboards in ATX format compatible with the R3 socket (better known as LGA 2011-3), although that theoretical enthusiast would need to invest about 4,100 dollars just in the CPU. Those who follow server hardware more closely see no big reason to get excited about the Xeon E5-2699 V4, since its Turbo mode remains in the orbit of 3.6 GHz, and core-by-core optimizations average 5 percent, but the backward compatibility of the R3 socket leads to lower costs and more solid software support.
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