Back to all articles Intel’s Xeon E CPUs are Looking Out for the Little Guys Published:
While the workstation world seems to be going core crazy, not everyone needs 20 CPU cores in their workstations. Instead, they need faster cores at lower numbers, to run their software. The Xeon E family of CPUs are coming to the rescue and if you prefer quality over quantity, these may be just the workstation CPUs for you.
In every desktop CPU market it seems that core count is king. Possibly thanks to some hard nudgin from AMD, we finally have both Intel and AMD CPUs for the mainstream consumer market sporting more than just four cores. If you have a modern enthusiast motherboard, you can now buy a CPU with as much as 32 cores. In the past, this sort of multithreading clout was reserved for high-end servers and workstations. Often with dual- and quad- socket configurations. That’s changing quickly.
The same thing has been happening with professional workstation CPUs. Core counts have been climbing rapidly, but this comes at a cost. The more cores you add into the die, the lower the per-core performance is thanks to thermal and power factors. Automatic overclocking technology makes up for this to an extent, but the bottom line is that the amount of headroom for applications with little threadedness is limited. On top of this, you can forget about also putting an iGP into these monsters, which means forking out money on a discrete GPU.
The Xeon E Value Proposition
So let’s look at who this CPU family is for and why we’re excited to use it in some affordable builds.
First and foremost, you are buying into the Xeon family. Which means you get access to all the grownup features no consumer CPU can give you, no matter how fast they are. These CPUs go into motherboards that support 40 lanes of PCIe traffic, Thunderbolt, ECC professional RAM, Optane memory and a long list of enterprise features.
So while a Xeon E is not a flagship 32-core CPU, you get all the side benefits. It also means more stability in software, fewer errors and glitches when crunching data and a general suitability for mission-critical applications. That’s why you buy a Xeon in addition to performance considerations.
You also get Intel integrated graphics at the higher end of their range. Which means 4K video, hardware encoding and mainstream 3D applications are possible without needing a discrete card.
The Performance Proposition
This is a CPU that’s not particularly relevant to most regular computer users, but as professional workstation builders we are very excited about the possibilities now on the table. To get this sort of multi-threaded performance before, we would have to use dual or quad-socket motherboards. The rest of the system would have to be equally exotic and expensive.
Threadripper 2 give us massive price headroom to build systems that provide all the multithreaded performance our customers need at prices that were simply impossible before. The fact that this is a regular (if high-end) desktop chip has a knock-on effect throughout the entire build. You can already get a taste of what’s possible in our Titan A399 Octane workstation. This is one of our first 2990WX builds ready for sale and it’s a jawdropper.
Be sure to keep an eye on our future releases, we’re going to do some fantastic things with this monster AMD CPU.
Who Should Buy a Xeon E Machine?
We think Xeon E is going to be the gold standard for CAD and CAM customers. They are also going to be perfect for media professionals who need fast performance, reliably at an affordable price. Which means you can expect some video and sound editing workstations with Xeon E processors in the near future. Especially since he Xeon iGP was built specifically for handling 4K content!
Either in entry-level professional desktop or mobile computer form, Xeon E has raised the bar at the lower end of the professional computing market, which should make a large percentage of our customer base smile!
To configure a Workstation using the Intel Xeon E CPU please visit our:
