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back to article Intel goes wide and deep with Xeon E5 assault

If you were planning on buying new servers in the coming weeks and months, Intel just gave you a whole lot of homework. And if you work at Advanced Micro Devices, you're getting some homework, too. Intel already has a slew of E5-2600 processors aimed at workhorse two-socket machines and a bunch of E7s in different flavors …

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  1. Tom Womack
    Boffin

    Intel thoroughly missing the point here

    These are not credible competitors to four-socket Opteron boxes, because they're so enormously more expensive; even if you regard a Sandy Bridge hyperthread as equivalent to an Opteron core, $1611 for eight 2.2GHz SB cores versus $639 for sixteen 2.2GHz cores is a big premium.

    The four-socket Opteron boxes are great for HPC-like jobs, my 4x6168 machine delivers 360GFLOP peak for about 700 watts and I've not had to fiddle around with Infiniband cards and switches to connect smaller boxes together.

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    1. James Turner
      Reply Icon

      Re: Intel thoroughly missing the point here

      I don't think Intel are missing the point, they just see gaps in their line-up that need filling. (i.e. between single socket and a full-on dual socket, and between dual socket and their big E7 quad setup).

      Intel cores are currently faster, clock for clock. For example, lets take anandtech's review of the E5-2600 ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/ ). In that they take a simulated E5-2630 (6 cores, 2.3GHz) and they reckon it beats an Opteron 6276. Thats a $616 CPU beating a $788 CPU (list prices for both).

      But still, the Opteron reaches futher down than the 2600 series does, so Intel knocked off a few of the extras to produce the 2400 series to compete with those. Likewise, the E7 is overkill for many where you just want 4 sockets-worth of ram and cpu, so bump up the E5 to fit there.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The smart money is with AMD

    Intel must be feeling the loss of sales as this is mostly a knee-jerk response.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    FFS

    "more SKUs with different prices for different features is generally a good thing for server shoppers"

    Within reason... sure, but this is insane.

    Do I want the 2.41 GHz or the 2.42 GHz version? Ooh look, there's a 2.43 GHz version... You never know, we might need that extra 0.02. How much extra is it again?

    Decisions, decisions

    : /

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