Intel Skylake-X vs Skylake-W

The new Intel core-i9 and core-i7 “enthusiast” “X”, Skylake-X processors and the single socket Xeon Skylake-W (Workstation) processors seem nearly identical. I’ll discuss the differences and make my recommendation on which to use.

Intel Scalable Processors Xeon Skylake-SP (Purley) Buyers Guide

Intel Purley platform, Skylake-SP, Xeon “Scalable” processors (Platinum, Gold, Sliver, Bronze) are here. All 58 of them! Hopefully this post will help you to decide which of these (excellent) processors may be of use for your applications. I trim the list do to just a few of my favorites and break them down by use-case.

Intel Xeon E5 v4 Broadwell Buyers Guide (Parallel Performance)

Intel’s Xeon E5 v4 processors are available and there are lots of them! The changes from the v3 Haswell are mostly small clock changes and increases in core count. You can now get a E5-2699v4 with 22 cores. In a dual socket system that’s 44 cores to work with. If the programs you want to run scale well with thread count then that could be a great processor for you. However, if your parallel scaling is not near linear then it may not be the best value. We have a dynamic chart of performance based on Amdahl’s Law that may help you decide which processor is best for your uses.

Intel Broadwell Xeon E5 2600v4 performance test

The Intel Xeon E5 2600 v4 Broadwell processors are finally available. My first Linpack testing with a E5-2687W v4 shows a greater than 35% performance increase over the v3 Haswell version! And, it’s the same price as the v3 version! It’s significantly better than expected.