Intel has released the Xeon Processor E7-8800/4800/28000 v2 family.
What comes to mind is Urs Hoelzle’s call to action that not all services can be provided by whimpy energy efficient low clock rate cores. There is a need for brawny cores.
Brawny cores still beat wimpy cores, most of the time
Urs Hölzle
Slower but energy efficient “wimpy” cores only win for general workloads if
their single-core speed is reasonably close to that of mid-range “brawny”
cores.
At Google, we’ve been long-term proponents of multicore architectures and throughput-oriented
computing. In warehouse-scale systems1 throughput is more important than single-threaded peak
performance, because no single processor can handle the full workload. In addition, maximizing singlethreaded
performance costs power through larger die areas (for example, for larger reorder buffers or
branch predictors) and higher clock frequencies. Multicore architectures are great for warehouse-scale
systems because they provide ample parallelism in the request stream as well as data parallelism for search
or analysis over petabyte data sets.
The Register has a detailed article.
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