Intel (News - Alert) has begun its shipment of the Xeon E5 chip that is based on the Haswell micro-architecture to server makers. Haswell is the codename for a processor micro-architecture developed by Intel as the successor to the Ivy Bridge micro-architecture, which is the codename for a line of processors based on the 22 nm manufacturing process developed by Intel. With Haswell, the company introduced a low-power processor designed for convertible or hybrid Ultrabooks.
The new Haswell Xeon E5 v3 chips have been given the codename Grantley. It will be considered the successor to the Romley chip, which is based on the Ivy Bridge micro-architecture. According to Brian Krzanich, who is Intel’s CEO, the new chip will be available this quarter. In fact, Lenovo (News - Alert) has already announced plans to launch a new line of servers based on Grantley this quarter and there is the speculation that server makers such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell (News - Alert) could also announce products soon.
During an earning call earlier this week, Krzanich mentioned that early adopters of the Haswell Xeon E5 v3 chips are helping to pump up revenues even before they officially come to market. It seems that big cloud builders and high performance computing customers are calling first dibs and getting the new chips as well. Krzanich said, “We think ... it’s going to be a very powerful product.”
Krzanich’s opinion is that while data centers start to consider upgrading their systems that the data center volumes will be, as he says, “lumpy.” This will result in Xeon E5 order sizes being quite varied. However, he does believe that a long-term look will show that the chip will continue to drive Intel’s data center business.
The Data Center Group is the division of Intel that makes processors, chipsets and motherboards that are used in servers, switches and storage arrays. While it is less than half the size of the chip maker’s PC Client Group, this division has been growing at quite a fast rate. During the earnings call, Krzanich said that the Data Center Group set an all-time record for sales in the second quarter.
It appears that for the past several Xeon E5 processor launch cycles, customers in the cloud and supercomputing spaces have been able to not only get their hands on the chips but also put them into production systems well ahead of the actual product launch date. This seems to be happening again with the Haswell Xeon E5 v3 processors.
The Grantley chip is said to have more processing cores than its predecessors. It will have DDR4 memory controllers and we can also expect to see memory DIMMs made available from Micron, Kingston, as well as others sometime this quarter. According to Intel, the company would be willing to customize chips with specific features; however, you can expect that most of the Grantley shipments will be standard chips.
Just about everything seems to have a computer in it these days. The Internet of Things has made it possible for many items to communicate with the Internet. To handle this growing traffic, UNICOM (News - Alert) Engineering has long been an associate member of the Intel System Alliance. This is a group that works closely with Intel to optimize product development in sync with Intel releases. The additional processing cores from the Grantley chip seem to be a good fit as most of these connected objects will rely on cloud-based services and data centers powerful enough to handle the load.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson