Figure 1 - 2012 Processor Numbering Example
WHITE PAPER
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7 Family
Performance Brief: Model Number Characteristics and Impact to Performance
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7 Family Performance and Model Numbers
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-8800/4800/2800 Product Families Characteristics and Impact to Performance
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Just like many automobile manufacturers and other companies that have multiple product lines within their product family, server processors have model numbers to help distinguish the differences in features and delineate value. As your business grows, so does demand for your products and / or services with additional customers, users, and transactions that strain your current IT infrastructure and back-end databases. The Intel® Xeon® brand helps customers
select the appropriate product line and family stack as their demand justifies it1.
This paper focuses specifically on the Intel Xeon processor E7 family which is designed to be expandable and scalable for larger deployments of business- or mission-critical workloads such as on-line transaction processing, physical-to-virtual machine consolidation projects, business intelligence, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) / line-of-business applications that generate revenue. The model numbers (see Figure 1) help differentiate the capabilities of the processors and in the case of the Intel Xeon processor E7 product family, the wayness or maximum number of processors (CPUs or sockets) in a node can be two, four, or eight (contrasted to the Intel Xeon processor E3 or E5 families, which support only one or two/four processors, respectively). Performance may scale as the number of processors installed (wayness) in a server is increased (up to 94% efficiency as published in this paper); but in a two-way server, regardless of the actual processor wayness capability, the throughput application performance would be expected to be the same.
MODEL NUMBERS AND
SCALABILITY
For the Intel Xeon processor E7 family, processor models (also called SKUs) are available in three wayness configurations – two, four, or eight socket native support (no third party node controller required to connect the
sockets together). Within a given Intel Xeon processor E7-xxxx SKU, the difference in wayness is irrelevant if populated in only a two-socket node and corresponding performance differences are negligible. For example, the top-bin Intel Xeon processor E7-8870/E7-4870/E7-2870 all have the same socket type (8) and the same
