Although server-grade CPUs based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge silicon have yet to arrive, rumors are already swirling about what’s in the cards for Intel’s next, next enterprise platform. Purported details about Haswell-EP have popped up in a series of slides leaked in the Chiphell forums. The images appear to be legit, and they reveal some interesting tidbits.
Haswell is the successor to Ivy Bridge, and it will be built on the same 22-nm process. The EP version will supposedly have at least 10 cores and support four channels of DDR4 memory at up to 2133 MT/s. There will be around 2.5MB of cache per core, according to the slides, and 40 lanes of gen-three PCI Express connectivity. Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost will be on the menu, of course.
According to the slides, Haswell-EP will be accompanied by a C610 platform hub code-named Wellsburg. This puppy promises 10 Serial ATA ports capable of 6Gbps transfer rates, an improvement upon the dual 6Gbps and eight 3GBps ports in the current C606 chipset. The C610 is supposed to include as many as six USB 3.0 ports and eight PCIe 2.0 lanes, as well.
Intel is expected to have DDR4-equipped server CPUs available in early 2014, which seems like a plausible timeframe for Haswell-EP. It will be interesting to see if enthusiasts get their own version, ala Sandy Bridge-E. Thanks to CPU-World for the tip.