Intel Corporation today introduced the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600/1600 v3 product families to address the requirements of diverse workloads and the rapidly evolving needs of data centers. The new processor families include numerous enhancements that provide performance increases of up to 3x over the previous generation, world-class energy efficiency and enhanced security. To facilitate the explosive demand for software defined infrastructure (SDI), the processors expose key metrics, through telemetry, which enable the infrastructure to deliver services with the best performance, resilience and optimized total cost of ownership.

The processors will be used in servers, workstations, storage and networking infrastructure to power a broad set of workloads such as data analytics, high-performance computing, telecommunications and cloud-based services, as well as back-end processing for the Internet of Things."The digital services economy imposes new requirements on the data center, requirements for automated, dynamic and scalable service delivery," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel. "Our new Intel processors deliver unmatched performance, energy efficiency and security, as well as provide visibility into the hardware resources required to enable software defined infrastructure. By enabling the re-architecture of the data center, Intel is helping companies fully exploit the benefits of cloud-based services."

Enabling Software Defined Infrastructure
Software defined infrastructure (SDI) is the foundation for cloud computing. The digital services economy requires agility and scale that demands all infrastructure resources be programmable and highly configurable. These abilities, coupled with telemetry, analytics, and automated actions, allow the data center to become highly optimized. Intel continues to invest in delivering this vision of an automated data center, and with the new Xeon E5-2600 v3 product family, the company has introduced key sensors and telemetry that further enhance SDI.

The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family introduce new features that provide greater visibility into the system than ever before. A new cache monitoring feature provides data to enable orchestration tools to intelligently place and rebalance workloads resulting in faster completion times. This also provides the ability to conduct analysis of performance anomalies due to competition for cache in a multitenant cloud environment where there is little visibility into what workloads consumers are running.

The new processors also include platform telemetry sensors and metrics for CPU, memory and I/O utilization. With the addition of thermal sensors for airflow and outlet temperature, the visibility and control has increased significantly from the prior generation. The processors offer a holistic set of sensors and telemetry for any SDI orchestration solution to more closely monitor, manage and control system utilization to help maximize data center efficiency for a lower total cost of ownership.

Increased Performance and Energy Efficiency
With up to 18 cores per socket and 45 MB of last-level cache, the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 product family provides up to 50 percent more cores and cache compared to the previous generation processors. In addition, an extension to Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (Intel AVX2) doubles the width of vector integer instructions to 256 bits per clock cycle for integer sensitive workloads and delivers up to 1.9x higher performance gains.

The Xeon E5-2600 v3 product family also increases virtualization density, allowing support for up to 70 percent more VMs per server compared to the previous generation processors, which helps to reduce data center operational expenses. Memory bandwidth constrained workloads will gain up to 1.4x higher performance compared to the previous generation with the support of next-generation DDR4 memory. Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) have also been enhanced to accelerate data encryption and decryption by up to 2x without sacrificing application response times.

The processors are built using Intel's industry-leading and energy-efficient 22 nm, 3-D Tri-Gate technology, cutting power consumption while boosting performance of transistors. The new "per-core" power states dynamically regulate and adjust power in each processor core for more power-efficient workload processing.

Combining both record performance and advanced efficiency features, the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family sets a new world record for server energy efficiency based on performance per watt.

Creating Open, Flexible Networks with Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 Processors
Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors can be paired with the Intel Communications Chipset 89xx series featuring Intel Quick Assist Technology to enable faster encryption and compression performance to improve security in a wide range of workloads. Service providers and networking equipment providers can use the platform to consolidate multiple communications workloads onto a single, standardized and flexible architecture to speed up services deployment, reduce costs, and create a more consistent and secure user experience.

In addition, the new Intel Ethernet Controller XL710 family helps address the increasing demands on networks with capabilities to enable better performance for virtualized servers and networks. The flexible 10/40 gigabit Ethernet controller provides twice the bandwidth while consuming half the power compared with the previous generation.

Extensive industry support
Starting today, system manufacturers from around the world are expected to announce hundreds of Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family-based platforms. These manufacturers across servers, storage and networking include Bull, Cray, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, Oracle, Quanta, Radisys, SGI, Sugon and Supermicro, among many others.

Pricing details
The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family will be offered with 26 different parts that range in price from $213 to $2,702 in quantities of 1,000. Intel Xeon processor E5-1600 workstations will be offered with six different parts in prices ranging from $295 to $1,723.