Enterprise CPUs
Sometimes choosing a CPU is hard. So we've got you covered. In our CPU Guides, we give you our pick of some of the best processors available, supplying data from our reviews. Our Best CPUs for Workstations guide mostly covers workstation processors available to consumers, although some server products cover both segments. As we have moved through 2020, there haven’t been many new releases for the high-end desktop market. It has been slow, and everyone has been able to sit on some new hardware for a while, knowing that they have the best for their money. The abundance of AMD’s Third Generation Threadripper processors and Intel’s Cascade Lake-X hardware means that users have had options depending on workload balance. The immediate horizon doesn’t show much...
Intel Xeon E3-1200 v7 Will Become Xeon Entry (Xeon E), Possible Intel with Radeon Graphics Launch
The last 12 months have seen an upheaval of Intel’s enterprise processor naming scheme, with a distinct mix of positive and negative responses. In previous years, Intel followed a...
8 by Ian Cutress on 11/28/2017MACOM Sells AppliedMicro’s X-Gene CPU Business
MACOM last week announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell the microprocessor-related assets it bought from AppliedMicro to Project Denver Holdings, a new company backed by...
13 by Anton Shilov on 10/31/2017Best CPUs for Workstations 2017
In our series of Best CPU guides, here’s the latest update to our recommended workstation CPUs list. All numbers in the text are updated to reflect pricing at the...
3 by Ian Cutress on 10/2/2017Hot Chips: IBM's Next Generation z14 CPU Mainframe Live Blog (5pm PT, 12am UTC)
IBM's mainframe business is a large element of their business. The z series is part of that business, and a very complex design, citing interesting and different processor design...
69 by Ian Cutress on 8/22/2017Analyzing Falkor’s Microarchitecture: A Deep Dive into Qualcomm’s Centriq 2400 for Windows Server and Linux
Developing a custom microarchitecture is difficult. Even with all the standards in place and licensing an instruction set such as ARM, the actual development takes time and the right...
43 by Ian Cutress on 8/20/2017Intel's Data Center Event Live Blog (8:30am PT)
Today Intel is running an event announcing the latest developments in their data center business. We're ready to live blog the registration-only event, and expect to see Navin Shenoy...
11 by Ian Cutress & Anton Shilov on 7/11/2017AMD's Future in Servers: New 7000-Series CPUs Launched and EPYC Analysis
The big news out of AMD was the launch of Zen, the new high-performance core that is designed to underpin the product roadmap for the next few generations of...
131 by Ian Cutress on 6/20/2017AMD EPYC Launch Event Live Blog (Starts 4pm ET)
I'm in Austin for AMD's launch event for their new server parts, named EPYC. Come back at 4pm ET (3pm Austin) for the Live Blog on the official announcement!
22 by Ian Cutress on 6/20/2017Intel’s Itanium Takes One Last Breath: Itanium 9700 Series CPUs Released
One of Intel’s ventures into the historic mainframe space was Itanium: a 64-bit capable processor designed in conjunction with Hewlett Packard. The main reason for Itanium was to run...
50 by Ian Cutress on 5/11/2017Intel Unveils the Xeon Scalable Processor Family: Skylake-SP in Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum
One of the more interesting elements of last week’s news was that some of the names of the future Intel Xeon processors, based on the Skylake microarchitecture, were accidentally...
21 by Ian Cutress on 5/4/2017Skylake-SP Xeon List Published: Moving from E7/E5 Naming to Xeon Gold and Xeon Platinum
Presumably by accident, Intel this week has published a list of its upcoming processors that belong to the soon-to-launch Skylake Xeon families. The names were published by Intel in...
32 by Ian Cutress & Anton Shilov on 4/27/2017Intel Launches Kaby-Lake based Xeons: The E3-1200 v6 Family
For the several generations previous, it has become customary for the Xeon equivalents of consumer processors to hit the market several months later. We saw the launch of Kaby...
54 by Ian Cutress on 3/28/2017AppliedMicro's X-Gene 3 SoC Begins Sampling: A Step in ARM's 2017 Server Ambitions
There has been a lot of recent movement in the ARM Server SoC space, with three major players. The third player, AppliedMicro, has been acquired by MACOM. MACOM has...
24 by Johan De Gelas on 3/15/2017AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2
For users keeping track of AMD’s rollout of its new Zen microarchitecture, stage one was the launch of Ryzen, its new desktop-oriented product line last week. Stage three is...
91 by Ian Cutress on 3/7/2017Intel Launches Atom C3000 SoCs: Up to 16 Cores for NAS, Servers, Vehicles
Intel this week formally launched its Atom C3000-series processors (formerly codenamed Denverton). The new chips are designed for inexpensive storage servers, NAS applications, as well as autonomous vehicles. The...
26 by Anton Shilov on 2/23/2017Qualcomm Demos 48-Core Centriq 2400 Server SoC in Action, Begins Sampling
Qualcomm this month demonstrated its 48-core Centriq 2400 SoC in action and announced that it had started to sample its first server processor with select customers. The live showcase...
88 by Anton Shilov on 12/16/2016AMD Announces 7th Gen Bristol Ridge PRO APUs with Extended Support
There are a number of directions for ‘professional grade’ processors in the market, varying from embedded to long-life support to server functionality. AMD’s PRO lines of processors are akin...
26 by Ian Cutress on 10/4/2016Early AMD Zen Server CPU and Motherboard Details: Codename ‘Naples’, 32-cores, Dual Socket Platforms, Q2 2017
At the AMD Zen microarchitecture announcement event yesterday, the lid was lifted on some of the details of AMD’s server platform. The 32-core CPU, codename Naples, will feature simultaneous...
64 by Ian Cutress on 8/18/2016Investigating Cavium's ThunderX: The First ARM Server SoC With Ambition
Today we're taking a look at Cavium's ThunderX, a highly integrated ARMv8 server SoC with 48 cores and lots of I/O. With the ThunderX, Cavium is looking to challenge...
82 by Johan De Gelas on 6/15/2016The Intel Xeon E5 v4 Review: Testing Broadwell-EP With Demanding Server Workloads
Fifteen months after first reaching consumers, Broadwell has finally arrived in the server space with Broadwell-EP. Premiering with the Xeon E5 v4 family, Intel is now offering server processors...
112 by Johan De Gelas on 3/31/2016