Category Archives: Intel

Recommended Memory Configurations for Skylake CPUs

The new architecture of the Intel Xeon SP (aka Skylake) CPU includes more memory channels, which is creating some uncertainty on best practices.  In today’s post, I’ll show you the best configurations to consider to help drive high memory performance. Continue reading

What You Need to Know About Intel Xeon SP CPUs

Today Intel officially launches the next generation rack, tower and blade server CPU – the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor (SP), formerly known as “Skylake.”  Before you invest in this next generation compute, there are a few things you need to know. Continue reading

Lenovo First to Announce Blades with New Intel CPUs

On June 20th, Lenovo released information about their upcoming blade servers built on the upcoming Intel Xeon processor: the two processor ThinkSystem SN550 and the four processor ThinkSystem SN850.  Although there doesn’t appear to be any spec sheets yet on the products, there are a few things that can be extracted from the published 3D tour. Continue reading

Intel Releases Broadwell CPUs for Servers

Intel officially launched the E5-2600 v4 CPU (code name “Broadwell”) today for servers which adds extra cores and faster memory.  Today’s release by Intel is not a major architectural CPU change, but instead an enhancement to their existing CPU offering.  This means you probably won’t see any “new” servers released, but you will have new CPUs to choose from in the future.  Before I go into the details of the E5-2600 v4, I want to take a second and help you understand Intel’s CPU strategy.   Continue reading

Blade Server Comparison – May 2015

Many of the blade vendors made announcements recently featuring the Intel Xeon E7 v3 CPU, so below is an updated chart of current blade servers.  Once Intel announces the Xeon E5-4600 v3 I’ll include those as well. Continue reading

Blade Server Comparisons – March 2015

It’s always good to have a single source of comparisons for the Tier 1 blade servers, so here is the updated list.  I realize that I should have posted this in December, but I guess it’s better late than never.  Continue reading

Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX Gets An Upgrade

The past few months have seen some long awaited new additions to Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX system.  In an effort to prevent this from being an “all Dell” blog, I’ve held off writing about these new additions until today.  In a quick summary, the new additions include: 2nd PERC, added support for VMware ESXi 5.5, added support for the M820 blade server and the ability to repurpose blade servers from the M1000e.  Let’s dig into each of these.

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Intel E5-4600 v2 CPU Announced

Intel announced the refresh of their 4 socket E5 line taking the CPU up to 12 cores, and 30MB of shared cache and supporting memory speeds up to 1866 MTS DDR3 DIMMs.


 

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I’ve updated the current blade server comparison list to include the E5-4600 v2 offering:

 

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Direct link to PDF (117kb): BladesMadeSimple_Blade_Server_Comparison_3.12.14

If you see anything missing or incorrect, let me know.

 

 

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 17 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market.

Disclaimer: The views presented in this blog are personal views and may or may not reflect any of the contributors’ employer’s positions. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any employer.