Intel’s flagship Skylake-EP Xeon E5 processor has been leaked on the web courtesy of a Chinese retail website. According to the leak, the flagship Xeon E5-2699 V5 Skylake-EP processor is going to take AMD’s Naples server platform head-on with a whopping 32 physical cores and 64 virtual threads. That’s an increase of ten cores over the 22-core Intel Xeon E5-2699V4A processor that Intel announced a few weeks back.
The chip is designed for the LGA3647 socket and is listed to feature a base clock of 2.10 GHz, although this might change in the final version. With 32 physical cores, the chip will be able to take on AMD Naples platform chips, which are expected to feature up to 32 physical Zen cores and 64 threads. The Skylake-EN (Xeon E7) flagship on the other hand could feature even higher number of physical cores, or Intel could go with the same 32 cores for both the Skylake-EP and Skylake-EN flagship SKUs. With Intel matching AMD’s upcoming Naples platform in terms of the core count, the company can perhaps look forward to continue dominating the server market next year as well.
The Skylake-EP chips, as announced by Intel recently, will be available starting mid-2017. The Skylake-EP chips will be bring with them a number of HPC optimizations such as Intel Advanced Vector Instructions-512 to boost floating point calculations and encryption algorithms. They will also integrate Intel Omni-Path architecture for high speed network and interconnects. Rival AMD will also debut its Zen-based Naples platform next year, possibly in the second quarter of the year.
Via: WCCFTech
