Server-grade hardware specifications sit far above what we see on the desktop, though with clear differences in specialized applications and environments, it's fair to say they're justified. Even so, the folks at Intel keep surprising us with their Xeon family. The E5-2699 V5 model, based on the Skylake-EP architecture, will push the physical core count to 32, which translates to 64 processing threads under Hyper-Threading.
The road to 32 cores
This is the rumor control, here are the facts: When we talked about the E5-2699 V3 in August 2014, the physical cores inside were 18. In early April we reported the launch of the E5-2699 V4, raising the core count to 22, and carrying a price of $4,100. The main advantage of the V4 series is that it retains compatibility with the LGA 2011-3 socket, so moving from a V3 chip to a V4 doesn't present major issues. However, we all know Skylake-EP is on its way, and that spells the end of the party on that socket. I estimate that there are still five or six months to go before the Intel Xeon E5-2699 V5 goes on sale, but it seems its specifications have leaked, along with a couple of images.
A giant among chips
The processor is... big. Truly gigantic. Increasing the chip's surface area is a logical path for Intel, especially considering that the physical cores in the E5-2699 V5 will be 32, ten more than the previous model. Several colleague sites indicate that the images appeared on the famous Chinese e-commerce portal Taobao, which explains the watermarks. Although it's an engineering sample, the etching reports a base frequency of 2.1 GHz, a small downward correction when compared to the V4, and suggests a Turbo mode of 3.4 or 3.5 GHz. What else do you gain besides the cores? A hex-channel DDR4 RAM controller, and support for 3D XPoint non-volatile memory modules (and I imagine all the Optane technology), among other things.
Socket P and the AMD threat
The socket you can see in the images (several motherboards appeared at the Computex 2016 convention) is the LGA 3647, also known by the designation "Socket P". And as always... take all these leaks with a grain of salt. Why? Because the official slides distributed by Intel don't indicate a ceiling of 32 cores, but rather 28. Anyway, once the genie is out of the bottle, it's almost impossible to put it back. On the web, there's speculation that the Intel Xeon E5-2699 V5 is a response to AMD's Naples platform, with a combination of 32 cores / 64 threads, and half a gigabyte of L3 cache. Are we witnessing the start of a competition? If so, welcome.
