In the past few years more and more PC users have started installing Intel Xeon processors in their motherboards due to several reasons – these chips usually come with more cores than their desktop equivalents, are cheaper or marginally more expensive or come with tons of cache that desktop processors simply do not have. So in this way they got extra performance for no extra money. What is not to like here?
It seems now that the trend will continue – the recently launched Broadwell-E generation has just gotten its first budget-oriented representative in the form of a Xeon processor. The chip is called Xeon E5-1620 v4 and comes based on the Broadwell-EP architecture. This means it features a die manufactured by using the latest 14 nm production process. In addition to this the processor comes with Hyper-Threading technology, 40 PCI-E 3.0 lanes and 10 MB of L3 cache for just USD 294. The downside is that the Xeon E5-1620 v4 features just four processing cores but they run at 3.5 GHz, which is not a bad clock speed. Moreover the chip natively supports DDR4-2400 memory and can take up to 1.5 TB of memory given you can find such a motherboard. And it runs in LGA 2011-3 motherboards that sport the Intel X99 chipset.
Despite having just four cores the Xeon E5-1620 v4 has every chance to become a very sought after processor thanks to all the other features it comes with. Unfortunately the chip is right now available only on the Japanese market but it will soon come to other countries. Speaking of this, this Xeon processor does not feature an Intel box cooler but this should not be much of a problem.
Source: Intel