For Day 2 of this blog series, I am going to talk about some of the upcoming Intel Xeon processors that we can look forward to seeing over the next six to twelve months.<\/p>\n

The two-socket Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 family (Ivy Bridge-EP) is due to be released in Q3 of 2013. They will have up to twelve physical cores (24 logical cores), with L3 cache sizes of up to 30MB. They will have two Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) 1.1 links and four DDR3 memory channels and along with 40 lanes of PCI-E 3.0. They will also support DDR3-1866 memory, along with Intel Secure Key<\/a> and OS Guard<\/a> features.<\/p>\n

This is a 50% increase in physical core counts compared to the current Intel Xeon E5-2600 family<\/a>. This would represent a significant increase in your SQL Server 2012 core-based licensing costs, so you may want to consider a lower core count model in some situations. We may also see a 50% increase in the maximum memory allowed in a two socket server compared to the current Xeon E5-2600 family, taking us up to 576GB with 16GB DIMMs, but that is just a guess on my part.<\/p>\n

The single-socket Intel Xeon E5-1600 v2 family (Ivy Bridge-EP) is also due to be released in Q3 of 2013. It will have up to six physical cores (12 logical cores). This could be a good solution for an entry-level, single-socket server.<\/p>\n

The two, four and eight-socket Intel Xeon E7-2800, E7-4800 and E7-8800 v2 families (Ivy Bridge-EX) are due to be released in Q4 of 2013. They are supposed to have up to fifteen physical cores (30 logical cores), with L3 cache sizes of up to 37.5MB. They will have three Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) 1.1 links and four DDR3 memory channels and along with 32 lanes of PCI-E 3.0. These processors will use the C602J chipset, and will utilize up to four C102\/C104 scalable memory buffers per socket. Each scalable memory buffer will support up to three DDR3-1600 DIMMS, so the maximum number of DIMMS per processor is going to be 24. This means that you could have up to 3TB of RAM in a four-socket server (with expensive 32GB DIMMs). More realistically, you would be economically limited to 1.5TB of RAM in a four-socket server with 16GB DIMMs. They will also have Intel Secure Key and OS Guard features, along with VT-x, VT-d and VT-c virtualization support.<\/p>\n

This is also a 50% increase in physical core counts compared to the current Intel Xeon E7 family. This would represent a significant increase in your SQL Server 2012 core-based licensing costs, so you may want to consider a lower core count model in some situations. On the positive side, this will be a jump from the somewhat elderly Westmere-EX all the way to the Ivy Bridge-EX (skipping the Sandy Bridge). This will give PCI-E 3.0 support to larger form factor servers and should give a very nice boost to overall system performance.<\/p>\n

The lower-end, two-socket Intel Xeon E5-2400 v2 family (Ivy Bridge-EN) is due to be released in Q1 of 2014 will have up to ten physical cores (24 logical cores). I think you should avoid this family for use in two-socket database servers, since the E5-2600 v2 will offer much better performance per physical core.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Day 2 of this blog series, I am going to talk about some of the upcoming Intel Xeon processors that we can look forward to seeing over the next six to twelve months. The two-socket Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 family (Ivy Bridge-EP) is due to be released in Q3 of 2013. They will have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,20,106,24,31],"tags":[333,107],"class_list":["post-670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sql-server-hardware","category-intel","category-ivy-bridge-ep","category-processors","category-sql-server-2012","tag-ivy-bridge-ex","tag-upcoming-intel-processors"],"yoast_head":"\n