Intel Preparing “Ivytown” 15 Core Xeon E7 Processors, Announcement Next Week

15 cores may sound like a strange number of cores but apparently Intel is working on a 15 core Xeon chip codenamed “Ivytown”. Fudzilla reports that Intel’s Ivytown 15 core CPU will be part of their Xeon E7 processor line-up and it will be announced next week. The highest end chip will have 4.31 billion transistors and will be Intel’s fastest performing server processor. The microarchitecture used will be 22nm Ivy Bridge, hence the Ivytown codename, and these Ivytown processors are to replace the last generation Xeon E7 processors based on 32nm Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.

The 15 core processors will support 4-8 socket servers and will come in 1.4-3.8GHz frequencies with 40-150W TDPs per CPU and support for 40 PCI Express generation 3 lanes. Each core will support hyper-threading as these are all high end parts. The cores are apparently arranged across three columns, which is why the best chip has 15 cores – 5 rows of 3. By that logic there are also likely to be cheaper and lower power varieties with lower numbers of cores, most likely 6, 9 and 12. These Ivytown processors will go head-to-head with AMD’s newly released Opteron 6300 server processors, notably the $598 Opteron 6370P 16 core processor with a 2GHz base clock, 2.5GHz turbo and 99W TDP.

Image courtesy of Intel