Thursday, February 12th 2015
Intel Haswell-EX an 18-core Leviathan
Intel's biggest enterprise CPU silicon based on its "Haswell" micro-architecture, the Haswell-EX, is a silicon monstrosity, according to its specs. Built in the 22 nm silicon fab processes, the top-spec variant of the chip physically features 18 cores, 36 logical CPUs enabled with HyperThreading, 45 MB of L3 cache, a DDR4 IMC, and TDP as high as 165W. Intel will use this chip to build its next-gen Xeon E7 v3 family, which includes 8-core, 10-core, 12-core, 14-core, 16-core, and 18-core models, with 2P-only, and 4P-capable variants spanning the E7-4000 and E7-8000 families. Clock speeds range between 1.90 GHz and 3.20 GHz.
Source:
CPU World
68 Comments on Intel Haswell-EX an 18-core Leviathan
Jokes aside, this is pretty good. I wonder what idle power looks like, rather than just TDP. I'm still running a somewhat older 2x E5472. The idle consumption and heat is the spoiler. If the new Haswell-EX E7v3's manage to noticeably cut the idle+average power consumption, then upgrades are merited for that reason alone.
If they optimise all game engines to use at least 90 % (see how modest I am) of its power and computing capabilities, we would already enjoy a much more beautiful world even than that of Crysis 3. :)
You can take the "sleeping" threads of those processors and tell them to calculate something, even to take some of the load of the GPU.
GPUs continue to grow with shaders count, right or no?
more cores is in vain when the OS/ apps cant fully utilize them
They use well-programmed programs and take efficiency as high as they can.
Yeah, I agree that the state of current gaming industry is bad but I guess, in 10 years it will be a different picture.
... and since then Intel has produced vastly more powerful Phi models as well as announced Haswell-EX Xeons above.
The short story is that there will be a point when this kind of power is almost in the hands of the consumer and the problem with be tackled from the other end - software. Several prominent developers have spoken their desire to design engines for ray-tracing. Many would like to be on the fore-front of such an evolution in graphics.
It's not Intel's fault that the vast majority of software only takes advantage of 1 to 2 cores/threads, and Intel already sells multiple chips specifically for the home market that can handle 8-16 threads. It's up to the software to take advantage of that.
Also, a home users CAN purchase server/workstation CPUs if they think their home office/game PC need two 16 core/32 thread CPUs (protip: it doesn't) and they have about $7000 to throw away.
And it's not Intel's fault that AMD can't make competitive chips.
Petey plane part of it deals with Intel twisting peoples arms during the Athlon 64 days. So alot of this is Intel's Fault not all of it though.