Vendors Roll out Intel Xeon E7 Servers for 30-40 Percent Speed Bump

Last week a host of HPC vendors rolled out new servers based on Intel’s latest “Westmere” 10-core Xeon E7 processors. As the high end of Intel’s X86 line, the E7 processors are a bit on the spendy side, so they are really targeted at applications that benefit from maximum core-count and memory size:

• Supermicro launched an 8-Way 80-Core SuperServer with up to 2 TB of DDR3 memory (64 DIMMs), 10 PCI-E Gen 2.0 expansion slots, (2+2) redundant Gold Level power supplies, and up to 24 2.5” hard drives in 5U chassis.
• AMAX announced that their ServMax H Class 4-way and 8-way HPC servers, which use the E7’s 2.67GHz performance and turbo boost technology to “achieve even faster speeds, with up to 40% performance improvement for data-intensive software applications such as ANSYS, AMBER 11, Jacket and 3ds Max.”
• Dell rolled out Poweredge servers with up to 40 cores and 2TB of memory.
• HP stepped up with new E7 blade servers and an 8-socket, 80-core beast of a server that supports up to 4TB of RAM.
• SGI announced a performance gain of up to 35% on the SGI Altix UV server line based on the Intel Xeon processor E7 product family. The Altix UV offers full-scale 256 socket support for the highest performing 130W processors.

In the wake of the announcement, Intel has published a number of eye-opening benchmarks on the Xeon E7 processors.