Dramatic growth in the volume and variety of data is bringing unprecedented opportunities for businesses - healthcare to transportation, banking to manufacturing - to make new discoveries and to deliver improved services and customer experiences. The key opportunity is turning the massive amount of core business data plus new sources of unstructured data into actionable and timely insights. In fact, research is finding that companies that use data-driven insights are two times more likely to have top quartile financial performance and five times more likely to make decisions faster than their competition, so it is no surprise that many companies are investing in analytics.

The Intel Xeon processor E7-8800/4800 v4 families offer robust performance, the industry's largest memory capacity per socket 2, advanced reliability and hardware enhanced security for real-time analytics so that businesses can rapidly gain actionable insights from massive and complex data sets. They are optimal for scale-up platforms, delivering large in-memory computing for real-time analytics as well as data-intensive workloads such as online transaction processing (OLTP), supply chain management (SCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), among others. The Intel Xeon processor E7 v4 family delivers up to 1.4 times higher performance, up to 10 times better performance for dollar and half the system power compared to IBM Power8-based solutions.

According to a leaked company slide doing rounds on the web, Intel plans to launch its workstation-grade Xeon "Broadwell-EP" processors by March 31, 2016. These chips will be branded under the Xeon E5-2600 V4 series. HP is ready with a workstation based on these chips, the HP Z640, which succeeds the Z620 that's driven by "Haswell-EP" Xeon chips. Dollar-for-Dollar, Intel is positioning the "Broadwell-EP" to offer at least "20% more cores and last-level cache" than "Haswell-EP."

This would mean Intel leveraging the 14 nm process to cram 10-core chips at the price of an 8-core chip from the previous generation, 8-core chips at the price of 6-core ones, and so on. The same slide mentions that "Broadwell-EP" offers, on average, 18% more performance than "Haswell-EP." Intel is also hinting at native support for DDR4-2400 MHz. Haswell-EP supports DDR4-2133 MHz.

Intel's first 5-gigahertz CPU will bear an unlikely brand - Xeon. The company's upcoming Xeon E5-2602 V4 quad-core chip based on the 14 nm "Broadwell-EP" silicon, is rumored to ship with a staggering 5.10 GHz clock speed out of the box. Getting there won't be easy for this socket LGA2011v3 chip. Despite being a quad-core chip, with just four out of ten cores on the "Broadwell-EP" silicon bring physically enabled, the chip's TDP is rated at 165W. Other features include 10 MB of L3 cache, and a quad-channel DDR4 memory interface.