When is a Xeon not quite a Xeon ?

[SlugBlanket]

I've read in many places in these forums that the Sandy Bridge Xeons will not be ready until at least q4 2011 and probably will not be in machines (Mac Pros) until early 2012.

I then read this article at the Anandtech site that Dell is currently shipping their T1600 workstations with Intel Xeon E3-1270.

I quote from that article:
"This chip is ostensibly an enterprise version of the desktop Core i7-2600, running at a nominal 3.4GHz and capable of turbo-ing up to 3.8GHz, but in this instance the integrated graphics have been disabled completely:"

In layman's terms if possible, what's the difference between this current sandy bridge Xeon and the ones that will be appearing later in the year ?

 

[Bear]

In layman's terms if possible, what's the difference between this current sandy bridge Xeon and the ones that will be appearing later in the year ?

The probably differences are:

• Multiprocessor support
• Maximum Ram
• True processing power.
• Cores per processor chip.
• Probably which processor socket they use.

The "Xeons" that Dell is using are desktop chips reworked to go in to a server. And the major reworking is that the integrated graphics are disabled.

 

[Umbongo]

In layman's terms if possible, what's the difference between this current sandy bridge Xeon and the ones that will be appearing later in the year ?

LGA 1155 Sandy Bridge processors: dual-channel memory over 4 DIMMs and 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes. Will probably top out at 3.6GHz 4-core for $320 when LGA 2011 is out.

LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge processors: quad-channel memory with up to three DIMMs per channel (expect only 4 memory slots per CPU on Mac Pros and most motherboards) and 32 PCI-E 3.0 lanes. Will start at 3.6GHz 4-core for around $320, and go up to a 3.2GHz 6-core for around $600 and then a 3.3GHz 6-core for $1000.

LGA 2011 is also the socket to be used for 2 and 4 way processor systems.

 

[saulinpa]

If you look at Intel's web site it actually lists the E3 series of workstation processors lower than the current 5000 series. So even Intel doesn't think that much of them. It is the E7 series that could be the next step. 10 core processors with 20 threads. Way too expensive yet and slower clock speeds.