Details on Intel Xeon E5 product families

Our yesterday's story on upcoming refresh of Intel Xeon 5600 family supplied some details on its successor, branded as Xeon E5. In the article, we named only one product family, Xeon E5-2600, when, in fact, there are four different families, aimed at single, dual- and quad-socket workstations and servers.

Workstation market will be targeted by Romley-WS platform, which is comprised of Xeon E5-1600 and E5-2600 families, and Intel C600-series chipset. The E5-1600 will work in uni-processor systems, while the E5-2600 will support dual-processor configurations. Both families will use socket R (LGA2011), and will be launched in the 4th quarter of this year.

Intel plans two product families, Xeon E5-2400 and E5-2600, for 2-socket servers, whereas Xeon E5-4600 is projected for 4-way servers. The E5-2400 family will utilize socket B2 (LGA1356), and E5-2600 / E5-4600-series CPUs will be compatible with socket R. Intel E5-2400 and E5-4600 microprocessors are expected in the first quarter 2012.

All Xeon E5 processors will use C600 (Patsburg) series chipset, that will be launched in 4th quarter 2011. Xeon 2600-series chips will have up to 8 cores, and accommodate all advanced Sandy Bridge features, such as HyperThreading, Turbo Boost technology, AVX and AES instructions, and VT-x / VT-d / VT-c virtualization. We don't any extra details on these and other E5 CPUs.

For your convenience, we compiled important (and known) family features in the table below:

Family	Sockets	Platform	Core name	Socket type	Planned launch date
Xeon E5-1600	1	Romley-WS	Sandy Bridge-EP	Socket R	Q4 2011
Xeon E5-2400	2	Romley-EN	Sandy Bridge-EN	Socket B2	Q1 2012
Xeon E5-2600	2	Romley-EP / Romley-WS	Sandy Bridge-EP	Socket R	Q4 2011
Xeon E5-4600	4	Romley-EP 4S	Sandy Bridge-EP 4S	Socket R	Q1 2012