Intel announced the new Xeon Processor E7v4 product family, designed to deliver horsepower for advanced real-time analytics and in-memory computing.
They are also optimal for scale-up platforms as well as data-intensive workloads such as online transaction processing (OLTP), supply chain management (SCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), among others. The Intel Xeon processor E7 v4 family delivers up to 1.4 times higher performance, up to 10 times better performance for dollar and half the system power compared to IBM Power8-based solutions.
For Real-time Analytics Workloads
The new processor family offers headroom for growth with traditional four- and eight-socket support, is designed for configurations up to 256 sockets via third-party node controllers, and has OEM system designs that currently feature up to 64 sockets. It also offers industry-leading memory capacity of up to 24TB in an eight-socket system, allowing massive datasets to be stored completely in memory, rather than on hard drives, to accelerate time to insight and decision-making.
Reliability for Critical Uptime of Services
The company says the new processors include more than 70 reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features, including Intel® Run Sure Technology that is unique to the Intel Xeon processor E7 family. These RAS features offer advanced data integrity and mission-critical system readiness that reduces the frequency and cost of server downtime. In addition, improved error recovery mechanisms and features such as memory mirroring offer exceptional data reliability without driving up system-wide memory requirements.
Enhanced Security
New security features built into the processors protect the most mission-critical, data-rich applications by encrypting data much faster, improving detection of sophisticated threats and increasing protection against malicious attacks.
The hardware-enhanced security capabilities in the processors provide up to 70 percent more encryption performance per core4 meaning that organizations can better protect a growing amount of data with minimal impact to their system’s performance, while delivering improved malware safeguards.
In addition, the Intel OS Guard now includes Supervisor Mode Access Protection to enable privileged access implementations that offer IT more control over which users have access to sensitive system data and also help prevent a malicious user from extending those vulnerabilities and exploiting other systems across the data center.
Virtualization
The processors also feature enhanced hardware-assisted virtualization allows IT to virtualize mission-critical enterprise workloads and move them into cloud-scale environments for new levels of agility and efficiency.
Improvements in virtualization performance and resource management include lower latencies when entering and exiting virtual machines (VMs), fewer VM interrupts via posted interrupts, and less overhead in fault-tolerant environments with page modification logging.
Smarter Resource Orchestration
The Intel Xeon processor E7 v4 family enables great IT infrastructure controls by including advanced telemetry features and orchestration technologies such as the Intel Resource Director Technology.
These features provide deeper visibility and control over shared platform resources, resulting in efficient scheduling, load balancing and workload migration across virtual machines. As a result, IT is able to improve asset utilization to deliver optimal quality of service levels across multiple applications.