WE FIGURED SOME of you might be interested in knowing what Intel has planned for its next generation of Sandy Bridge Xeon processors when it comes to the model numbers and we’re afraid we have bad news; it’s gotten even more complex. If you read our piece detailing some of Intel’s new Xeon processors based on Sandy Bridge, then you’ll know that Intel has changed its numbering scheme once again and the Xeon’s now start their model name with an E and then it gets trickier from there on in.
From what we know there will be at least three different Sandy Bridge product lines, the E3, the E5 and the E7. So in other words, Intel appears to have replaced the i with an E on the Xeons compared to the Core processors. That takes care of the first letter and digit, but each of the new Xeons then has an additional four digits, a potential letter and even a version number after that. Talk about making life easy for your partners and customers.
The first digit after the dash – as there’s a dash in all the model names now as well after the product line E number – signifies “wayness” or how many sockets are supported at the most. So here it’s simple as we’ll get 1, 2, 4 and 8 as in single socket, dual socket, quad socket and finally eight-way socket support. The second number will at least for now be a 2, 4, 6 or 8 and this relates to the actual CPU socket. A 2 stands for H2 or LGA-1155, a 4 stands for B2 which is supposedly LGA-1356 – a socket that so far hasn’t been officially confirmed, although something we’ve seen listed over at Impress PC Watch in Japan – 6 stands for R which is LGA-2011 and finally 8 stands for LS which is the same LGA-1567 socket as the Westmere-EX platform currently use.
That brings us to the final two digits which are simply the product SKU, although judging by the E3 series of Xeon processor, if the second digit is a five then the CPU has integrated graphics (altough this doesn’t seem to apply to the low Voltage models). So far there’s only one letter possible as a suffix and that’s an L which stands for Low Power. So far we don’t know what the version number that might be tacked on the end will stand for, but this is most likely related to CPU revisions or something similar.
And just for you, our lovely readers, we dug up some details on the Xeon E5 series of processors. The fact that we’re looking at up to six cores here suggests that this could very well be the next generation Gulftown processors, also known as Sandy Bridge-EN. It makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider the CPU socket which in this case is the B2 or LGA-1356. Intel is aiming these processors at both high performance computing workstations and servers whereas the E3 Xeons are intended for servers and desktops in the small business and educational markets.
In related news we also spotted a few more chipset model names and for Sandy Bridge we’re looking at the C600 series for high-end data center solutions and as we mentioned in our previous article, the C200 series for the single CPU solutions, although specifically the C206 is a model that will launch. It’s not clear what the C stands for, it just seems to be Intel’s new Xeon chipset designation, whereas the first digit is the PCH segment, the second digit the generation and the last digit is the SKU. As such we’ll see the C210 and C610 series chipset and so on in the future. Apparently Intel is also planning ancillary chipset components such as memory buffers that should end up in the C100 series of chipsets.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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