After many years of working with these platforms on a daily basis, and many hours over the past few weeks running benchmarks, it's clear than Intel's Xeon E3-1200 family is progressing along in an evolutionary manner. At some point, this could become a pain point for Intel. ARM's technology is improving to the point of doubling performance every 12-18 months. Those same architectures are coming to the server market, where they'll land between the Atom and Intel Xeon E3 line-ups. Conversely, Intel's Xeon E5-2600 v2 chips based on Ivy Bridge-EP are poised to provide a 50% improvement in 18 months. Fortunately for Intel, it also has the Avoton processors for micro-servers waiting in the wings, based on its Silvermont architecture.
At the high-end of the Xeon E3-1200 range, however, innovation has certainly slowed (similar to what we've seen in the desktop space). That doesn't mean the latest CPUs are without their merits, though. In terms of power, Intel's new v3 generation shows off the architecture's emphasis on reducing idle consumption. Performance from the HD Graphics P4600 engine is also quite a bit better, but as we already know, it's still a ways off from what you'd get with a discrete GPU. We would have loved to see a version of the processor with Iris Pro 5200, certified for professional applications.
A majority of Xeon E3s are sold into server environments where the HD Graphics component isn't needed, though. In those applications, improvements made to the Haswell architecture are really significant. Furthermore, as density continues to be emphasized by micro-servers for the cloud and other applications (like HP's Moonshot), having fewer components down on the motherboard helps enable smaller designs. Haswell's fully-integrated voltage regulator facilitates this. The architecture's advantages really map over well to the datacenter, then. Lower idle power use, better performance, and fewer on-board components are all great differentiators.
GPU-enabled versions, such as Intel's Xeon E3-1275, are meant for mid-range workstations requiring ECC-capable memory and no discrete graphics card. I can't help but think back to Chris Angelini's The Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn, where his conclusion weighed the modest performance gains against existing LGA 2011-based solutions. The fact of the matter is that the entry price for a new LGA 2011-based CPU is similar to the Xeon E3-1275 v3 if you're planning to use an add-in graphics card. The bonus you get from either a Sandy Bridge- or Ivy Bridge-EP-based setup is that the number of cores you can get your hands on, total PCIe connectivity, and memory throughput are all greater than what the LGA 1150 platform supports.
At the end of the day, the fact that we have Intel's Xeon E3-1275 as a persistent offering through three generations means there are professionals buying this CPU. The addition of ECC support is notable, as are the improved power characteristics. Of course, purchasing a workstation CPU with on-die graphics over one without means that subsystem is important to you. And in that sense, the success of Xeon E3-1275 v3 is largely contingent on Intel's ability to add professional application certifications, continue enhancing performance, and expound on features like OpenCL support.
As a closing thought, Intel is charging the same price for its Xeon E3-1275 v3 as its boxed Core i7-4770K. The operating frequencies are the same, and features shared between them are very similar. Given this, we'd really like to see the Core i5 and i7 include ECC support, too.
- The Intel Xeon E3-1200 Series' Evolution
- Three Generations Of Xeon E3-1275 CPUs
- Supermicro SuperWorkstation 5037A-iL: Our LGA 1155 Test Platform
- Supermicro SuperWorkstation 5038A-iL: Our LGA 1150 Test Platform
- Hardware Setup And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Adobe CS6
- Results: Content Creation
- Results: Productivity
- Results: Compression Apps
- Results: Media Encoding
- Power Consumption And Noise
- Xeon E3-1275 v3: A Lot Like Haswell On The Desktop, With Pro Features
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0 HideKeyboard_only , 23 September 2013 13:57Are those 3DMark 11 results correct? A Xeon using on-die graphics can achieve ~11K points in 3DMark 11?