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  • lefty2 - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    So, these are just desktop Skylake CPUs with Xeon branding. I wonder if it'd be possible to do the same thing with Ryzen 7 CPUs?
  • Kvaern1 - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    They get to be Xeons when they have ECC support and a few other non core features and go through addional QA.

    Or in other words, no.
  • r3loaded - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    You mean the ECC support that's present on the die but deliberately gimped by Intel on their desktop branded parts. Yeah, still (largely) a rebranding exercise to charge more for the same silicon.
  • Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    That ECC support wouldn't be there at all without these Xeon processors existing. It's not like the ECC support comes for free. It is bought and paid for and the cost is applied to the market that demands it. If not, the Core processors would lose competiveness because of higher cost and Intel would lose money by trying to serve the market for these Xeon processors. If that was the only other option they simply would choose not to bring these processors and the ECC that comes with them to market.
  • prisonerX - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    Wow, checking a parity bit, so expensive! Probably a quarter of the die, hey?
  • Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    I'm sure there's more to the difference between the Xeon and the Core chips than ECC support. That was just the particular example the previous poster mentioned. Do you think customers who buy Xeons are stupid or have no pricing power? Neither are true. The cynics in this forum just don't understand the metrics that are important to these companies.
  • prisonerX - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Well I was struck by your "It's not like the ECC support comes for free" line, becuase it is essentially free. I don't think Xeon customers are stupid, but they certainly have no pricing power, Intel charges whatever it can keep a straight face with.

    Arguably most Xeons are rebranded desktop chips, albeit somewhat better binned ones with more L3 cache (which doesn't make that much difference) since they have the same cores and essentially the same feature sets. There is more to Xeons than EEC, but they're mostly gimmicks at worse and marginal, specialist features at best. In terms of mainstream use, which is 99% of the market, they make little difference.

    Those "metrics" you talk about are just corporate buzzwords that corporate bozos use to justify their paychecks but actually make next to zero difference to what most companies do.
  • ACE76 - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Ceon only adds ECC...And higher core count variants at lower frequencies down the line...They don't perform any better than the desktop variant they are based on...I think in today's server market, ECC has become rather a non talking point anyway..Kind of like RAID 5 largely being considered useless...I've worked at various companies that used Dell workstations that didn't have ECC and held up for 24x7 usage as small servers just fine...Intel has had this market cornered for a long time, so they charge what they want... Hopefully AMD's Naples brings that to a screeching halt.
  • fazalmajid - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    And yet AMD manages to include ECC support for free in Ryzen, not just Naples.
    It's price-gouging market segmentation by Intel, nothing less.
  • Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    AMD also has almost no data center business to speak of. Yeah, these companies are stupid and are just throwing their money away. Even worse than your implication of that is your abuse of the term "price-gouging".
  • duploxxx - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    and that is because of? right the old staggering way of IT business, go with the known brand. 0 open mind.

    we have sold thousands of workstations and servers with opteron. Even today we still have the opteron in portfolio and selling it. 16 cores 6380 is still a bargain vs 8 real intel cores for same price. But yet in many countries its just not done even at a time when the price/perf was really in favor of opteron.
  • leexgx - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    fazalmajid -

    ((( And yet AMD manages to include ECC support for free in Ryzen, not just Naples.
    It's price-gouging market segmentation by Intel, nothing less. ))))

    no RYZEN its Compatible with ECC modules, ECC is Not enabled on RYZEN at the moment (1bit correct and system stop on uncorrect is disabled unless motherboard makes like ASrock and ASUS manage a way to bypass it and enable it) and AMD might enable it later on but like intel they likely have more interest in enabling it only on workstation/server cpus
  • cbm80 - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Oh yeah, Intel would definitely exit the server market if they couldn't charge for ECC. It's such a tiny, unprofitable market for them, it wouldn't be worth their time.
  • nwai2208 - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    In case you don't know, some models of Pentium, Celeron or even Atom have ECC support
    https://ark.intel.com/Search/FeatureFilter?product...
    Yes, that critical feature is available to a $27 processor
  • extide - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link

    I think even i3's do -- they just don't want the i5/i7 to compete with these chips for people who want high perf AND ECC.
  • lazarpandar - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    You're factually correct but your implication isn't. Customers wouldn't benefit if Intel stopped practicing this 'rebranding exercise'.
  • prisonerX - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    You're factually incorrect, becuase your implication is incorrect. Overcharging for Xeons doesn't mean that Intel forgoes overcharging and under-featuring other products in their lineup. Only Intel's bottom line benefits.
  • lazarpandar - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    I actually wasn't implying anything, thanks.
  • prisonerX - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Oops somehow I misread your "wouldn't"
  • benzosaurus - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    Explaining the bizarre situation where many consumer i3s actually do support ECC, but no consumer i5 or i7 does.
  • leexgx - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    ((Explaining the bizarre situation where many consumer i3s actually do support ECC, but no consumer i5 or i7 does.))

    its the chipset (c200) and BIOS that is disabling or enabling the ECC support on i3 (all intel CPUs support ECC function its just disabled artificially by intel to push you to XEON cpu)
  • carewolf - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    So is i5 and i7. Everything with Intel is artificially tiered.
  • saratoga4 - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    You have it backwards. They get to have ECC support turned on when they're sold as Xeons.
  • lefty2 - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    Ryzen CPUs do have ECC
  • prisonerX - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    That's why they're so expensive compared to Intel.

    "It's not like the ECC support comes for free."
  • hamoboy - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    Yeah sooo expensive. That 6900K is a steal compared to an 1800X.
  • Samus - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    I thought most AMD cpus do?

    Anyway, the difference between Xeon E3's and Core i5/i7 simply comes down to the microcode inside the processor, enabling certain parts of the die. At the die level these chips are all the same and just binned for clockspeed.
  • carewolf - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Of course Ryzen has ECC. All AMD processors have ECC. It is trivial to implement and you deliberately have to gimp the CPU by removing the 8 parity legs to disable it like Intel does.
  • leexgx - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    no RYZEN its Compatible with ECC modules,

    ECC is Not enabled on RYZEN at the moment (1bit correct and system stop on uncorrect is disabled unless motherboard makes like ASrock and ASUS manage a way to bypass it and enable it)

    AMD might enable it later on but like intel they likely have more interest in enabling it only on workstation/server cpus
  • tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    Instead of reading the article, you chose to ask a question that you hoped world demonstrate your nerd cred but instead showed your ignorance?
    FYI: features that requires vpro and ecc support
  • Diji1 - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    There's not really much point in responding to users that are still in the "so ignorant about a subject that that they do not know how much they do not know" stage of knowlegde now is there ;)
  • eldakka - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Unless you want to play with them and make them more confused that is ;)
  • tuxRoller - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    It's just a little annoying and feels like an attempt to score points with the popular kids by bullying an easy target. Nature being as it is, what choice did I have but to bully the upstart?
    Also, regardless of whether you are speaking of me, I dare to say that very few of us "know how much we don't know" about any non-contrived field O:-)
  • PixyMisa - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Ryzen supports ECC if you have the right motherboard (Asrock and Gigabyte seem to support it, not sure about others).

    I'd love to see a Supermicro Socket AM4 motherboard; the R5 1600 and R7 1700 look like they would make a great CPUs for small servers.
  • leexgx - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    no RYZEN its Compatible with ECC modules,

    ECC is Not enabled on RYZEN at the moment (1bit correct and system stop on uncorrect is disabled unless motherboard makes like ASrock and ASUS manage a way to bypass it and enable it)

    AMD might enable it later on but like intel they likely have more interest in enabling it only on workstation/server cpus
  • azrael- - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    No, these are Kaby Lake-based Xeons. Essentially identical to the corresponding Core iX variants, but with a few bits less fused off.

    It begs the question of support, however. Specifically, Windows support. Is Intel trying to force customers on to Windows 10 with the new Xeon E3 v6 line as well? I'm not sure this will go down well in the enterprise sector.
  • Meteor2 - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    What's Windows 10 got to do with servers? Do you mean Server 2016?
  • Meteor2 - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Oh you're talking about workstations of course :)
  • azrael- - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Indeed. :-)
  • willis936 - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    I wonder what the BER is for a typical DDR4-3000 implementation (PHY + channel) that ECC is considered worth the expense.
  • kaesden - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    do the parts without IGP actually have different/smaller dies or are they just disabled/gimped? If the dies are smaller, i'd love to see that introduced on the desktop line for some cost savings, though i doubt intel would pass those savings on to the consumer, so its probably moot.
  • Cygni - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    It's the same die with physically disabled graphics to get a slight frequency bump.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    According to the table in this article, disabling the iGPU doesn't decrease the CPU's base frequency or max turbo clock. In fact, in the case of the E3-1220 v6 and it's iGPU-equipped sister the E3-1225 v6, the iGPU variant has a 300MHz higer base clock and a 200MHz higher max turbo. That suggests Intel is using their better/more efficient dies in the iGPU versions and they certainly don't appear to be wringing out more performance for the lack of the iGPU. However, some amount of testing would be necessary to see if those processors without integrated graphics can sustain higher clocks for longer over a variety of workloads in order to be certain of anything.
  • TallestJon96 - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    Is the pricing correct on this chart for the last one? Nearly $300 extra for .1ghz extra? Am I missing something?
  • bsd228 - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    yes- that does boggle the mind. I'd say even the 3.8 part seems sufficiently higher that the 3.7 part looks more reasonable.
  • mooninite - Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - link

    "This essentially means that Optane Memory support is already baked into the chipset..."

    Protip: Intel's Optane Memory is a pure software solution driven by Intel's storage driver in Windows. It's all marketing fluff.
  • eldakka - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Except for Octane in RAM sockets, that I _believe_ will require motherboard support.

    But for Optane SSDs you are definitely correct.
  • duploxxx - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    boring SKU, way to many cpu with marginall diff. only 2-4 real cores for entry workstations tsss time for some competition.
  • mdw9604 - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Move on. Nothing to see here. Intel hasn't innovated on the Desktop in a decade. This is boring
  • AnTech - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    "Intel Launches Kaby-Lake based Xeons: The E3-1200 v6 Family"

    For brand new Mac Pro 2017?
  • ACE76 - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Am I the only one baffled at that pricing chart...Paint double for 100mhz??
  • drajitshnew - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    Many thanks to Ian for summarising the xeon families. I would REALLY appreciate a pipeline post differenciating between
    xeon E3 1200 & 1500
    Xeon E5 1600 vs 2600 vs 4600
    Xeon E7 4800 vs 8800
  • Gothmoth - Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - link

    don´t trust intels presentations:

    https://semiaccurate.com/2017/03/27/intel-crosses-...
  • AGS3 - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    We shouldn't expect much from new cpus in the near future as silicon technology has hit wall. Intel has the server market and has been focused on 14nm and 10nm for the exploding mobile device market and lower power consumption. See this three part series from 2011 which explains why little has changed since then.
    http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4368705/T...

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