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I'll go ahead and ask the newbie question - what's the benefit? I can see how more cache and better multiprocessing would be important to a server but how does
by danparsonson 11y ago
I'll go ahead and ask the newbie question - what's the benefit? I can see how more cache and better multiprocessing would be important to a server but how does a Xeon improve a single user system? Do they have some other secret sauce? I'm assuming they're not expecting anyone to build a laptop with more than one of these in it?
- mkonecny 11y agoA ton of designers or developers are doing work with graphics or compiling on the go - both very CPU bottlenecked operations, and the Xeon is targeting this audience. Me personally I do a lot of Android development, and waiting 20 seconds to compile each time I make a change is a huge bottleneck.
- danparsonson 11y agoSure, but how does the Xeon improve over the i7 in that respect?
- mappu 11y agoE3s are basically i7s with different binning, e.g. there are E3s without the IGP ; so if an i7 part has yield issues with the IGP, it can be disabled, binned as a Xeon E3 and sold more cheaply than the equivalent i7. 2P/4P multi-cpu is the other major feature of Xeon which only appears in E5/E7.
- x0054 11y agoI am not an expert, but from what I know, Xeon based chips have a lot more PCI and other IO lanes. So you can for instance have a dedicated lane for each thunderbolt and USB 3 port on the laptop. With i7, you may have 2 thunderbolt ports, for instance, but those 2 ports will share the same 20Gbps lane to the chip. With Xeon you can, at least theoretically, connect each thunderbolt on its own lane. Edit: According to the Wikipedia the Skylake i7 and i5 suppose to have 20 PCIe lanes. [1] The Xeon E5 v3 Family has 40 PCIe lanes, so I am assuming same is going to be true for the Skylake version of the Xeon. You also have the possibility of 6 cores! I'll take that :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)
- wmf 11y agoExcept this is a Xeon E3, which is the same chip as an i7 including the same limitations.
- x0054 11y agoOh :( That sucks. I was looking foreword to having multiple full speed Thunderbolts.
- jschwartzi 11y agoIntel makes LGA2011 i7s with up to 40 PCIe lanes. See, for instance, the Core i7 5930. The 5820 has 28 lanes. They're marketed as "high end desktop" chips, and they're socket-compatible with the Xeon.
- dogma1138 11y agoWhat are you going to use 40 pice lanes on a laptop for? Unless you are running 4 discrete graphic cards or an army of nvme ssd's you won't tap half of that...
- eropple 11y agoTwo 4K monitors?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jlawer 11y agoThe big one is ECC memory.
- tacticus 11y agoThere really is no good reason intel keep removing this from the consumer cpus.
- dgemm 11y agoMarket segmentation.
- staunch 11y agoYou can segment on anything, if you want, the question is whether ECC should be a standard in all computers. It probably should be.
- lewisl9029 11y agoECC does come at a cost of raw performance though. From a marketing perspective it might not be a good idea to introduce a feature that would cause performance regressions in a new product.
- xioxox 11y agoWhat cost is there? This benchmark shows almost the same performance for ECC memory: http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/ http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/
- kjs3 11y agoThere are all sorts of things that "should" be standard on all computers, but until the average consumer (non-technical, not HN reading) starts saying "I got to get me some ECC memory" it's not going to be something Intel cares about.
- 11y ago
- lewisl9029 11y agoSupport for registered memory is another one. I learned this the hard way when I bought a 2x16GB registered DDR3 kit, and then finding out my i5 won't boot with it. It was next to impossible to find unbuffered memory with 16GB per module last time I checked.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- chefkoch 11y agoThis also means you need ECC memory.
- vardump 11y agoHe said registered. I don't think you can buy registered RAM that's not ECC. It's the type of ECC RAM you need for E5 & E7 Xeons - multiple physical CPUs. Many of these systems won't even boot with normal DDR3 sticks, ECC or otherwise. Must have registered DDR3 (and I suppose DDR4 now).
- kjs3 11y agoI vaguely remember you could buy non-ECC registered memory back in the SDRAM days for servers. It was before we really understood trans-gigabyte error rates.
- Freaky 11y agoYou typically don't get registered memory support on the basic single-socket Xeons. It's more a multi-socket thing.
- lsc 11y agoyeah, none of the E3 xeons, to my knowledge (and I own, let me see. more than five, less than ten) - none of them support registered memory. They do support unbuffered ECC, which is pretty great, but at least the v2 units I've got are limited to 32gb ram, which stinks.
- Sanddancer 11y agoOddly enough, one of the biggest benefits is going to be in the gpu. If you're doing 3d design, you're not going to be able to get support for Autocad, Solidworks, etc unless you have a supported platform. One of the benefits of Xeon graphics is the extensive testing done on the chips to the point where you can use the integrated graphics in CAD software. Up until now, if you wanted a mobile workstation to do cad, you had to get one with a mobile firepro or quadro, even if your needs were relatively modest.