In just a few short weeks, Intel will be releasing their Skylake-X processors and AMD releasing their new Ryzen lineup. Despite debuting over half a year ago, Intel has curiously decided to add to their Broadwell-EX Xeon lineup with a new processor. The new Xeon E7-8894 v4 is a massive chip with a total of 24 cores with 48 threads through HyperThreading. The base clock comes in at 2.4 GHz and it boosts up to 3.4 GHz.
Intel is claiming that the E7-8894 v4 is its fastest Xeon E7 processor ever and there is little doubt about that. Specifically, Intel says the E7-8894 v4 is 3.69x faster than the Westmere Xeon E7-8870 which is not surprising given the higher clock speeds and more than doubled core count. Against last generations Haswell Xeon E7-8890 v3, the performance jump is a more sedate 25-50%.
It’s hard to see why the E7-8894 v4 is being released so late in the cycle. We already have the E7-8890 v4 which clocks in at 2.2 GHz base and 3.4 GHz boost which is really comparable in performance already. The most likely answer is that Intel has wanted to launch it from the beginning but was waiting for the yields to make sense to do so. At a hefty $8898 price tag though, only the enterprise has wallets deep enough for this CPU.
