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Why is the E7 so hard to find?

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Quadibloc

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Jan 20, 2012, 4:42:59 PM1/20/12
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I was excited when I heard the news that the Xeon E7 chip would bring
to the x86 platfom the kind of RAS features that had previously only
been available for the Itanium (and, of course, other architectures
like SPARC and IBM mainframes).

However, currently, in looking for servers, I find that the E7 is only
available in blade or rack servers, not in the humbler tower servers.
Is the E7 so expensive, or are the RAS features of such limited use
except in very large-scale systems, so that this makes sense?

John Savard

Mark F

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Jan 21, 2012, 3:21:14 PM1/21/12
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Intel Xeon Processor E7 Family:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-processor-e7-family.html?iid=subhdr%20itc_xeon

Click on: "See detailed product specifications"
on the right under: "Product Specifications"

and get to:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-processor-e7-family.html?iid=subhdr%20itc_xeon
"Intel Xeon Processor E7 Family Specifications",
which shows a list of processors with some of the features. I don't
know if the list is complete.


I think the E7-28nn is for up to 2 sockets, which I think is what you
want.

I think E7-48nn are for up to 4 sockets, E7-88nn for up to 8
sockets.

Using www.froogle.com seems to indicate that the price depends mainly
on the L3 cache size.

I think about US$1500 to US$4500 depending on cache.
(I've left out the 6 core stuff in the prices and features)

Add about US$200 to US$400 for going from -2nnn to -8nnn

I'm not sure what differences there are beyond:
. number of cores (6, 8, 10)
. threads per core (1,2=HyperThreading)
. cache size (18MB, 24MB, 30MB)
. speed (2GH to 2.67GHz)
. low power optimization
( No = 105W or 130W , yes 95W)

. maximum sockets (2,4,8)

I don't know if any or all have RAS.

This has a nice table of functionality and some prices for
1000 units from about 2011 June:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/19/xeon_e7_analysis/page2.html
"Xeon E7 servers run with the big dogs
Gives chase to RISC and Itanium foxes"
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Posted in Enterprise Tech, 19th June 2011 11:00 GMT


Orson Cart

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Jan 25, 2012, 7:58:27 PM1/25/12
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Obviously Intel's market research stuffed up.
They underestimated how many people were willing to fork out
over $4000 to boast
"My cache is bigger than your cache"
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