Intel Launches Xeon E-Series CPUs: Coffee Lake’s Business Cousin

Intel is rounding up its workstation focused Xeon range, with a new entry-level range, the Xeon E series. This will be a direct replacement of the Xeon E3 V6 range, complete with a new chipset to boot. The new E-series chips are basically Coffee Lake 8000-series CPUs, but with the usual assortment of Xeon features such as VPro and ECC memory.

There will be an initial launch of 10 CPUs, ranging from models with and without Hyper-Threading and integrated graphics, starting with the Xeon E 2104, up to the 2186G. The G indicates the inclusion of UHD P630 integrated graphics. Core frequencies are slightly higher than the mainstream counterparts, likely due to the inability to overclock. TDP is typically 71-80 Watts, with the top-end chip being 95W for the 6-core 12-thread E 2186G with the IGP. Memory supported will be DDR4-2666 in ECC and non-ECC configurations, up to 64GB over 2 channels.

With the updated graphics capabilities, 3D applications and GPU-accelerated workloads will see performance upticks of 1.45x, and general compute of up to 1.33x compared to the previous E3 1200-v6 chips, although with two more extra cores on the chip, this is not due to any kind of major leap in IPC performance.

Despite being LGA1151 socket parts, the new chips will require a new chipset in order to function, C246, and will not work with the older C236-based or consumer 300-series motherboards. Worth noting though is that the new chipset will have integrated wireless support built-in.

All of the CPUs will support 40 PCIe lanes, however, this is split as 16 lanes directly attach to the CPU, and the remaining 24 connected to the chipset. These ‘real’ and ‘fake’ PCIe lanes have usually been kept separate in the past, but Intel has resorted to combining the two more recently, much to everyone’s confusion. The two types of lanes are not equal in performance, with the chipset lanes being only useful for I/O support such as with USB 3.1, Thunderbolt, and SATA drives, and the more valuable CPU lanes being used for desktop graphics and NVMe-enabled M.2 SSDs.

The E-Series chips will be built on the same manufacture process as Coffee Lake, 14nm++. There is no indication at this time of an 8-core chip in the lineup, although there are rumors of a possible release, as the current pricing of the top-end E 2186G is some $200 short of the previous top-end E3-1200 chip from last generation, so there is a possibility down the line of a larger chip.

System integrators such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, will be releasing updated models for their respective workstation systems over the coming weeks. On initial inspection of a recent update to Dell’s Precision range, it’s worth noting one of the extra hidden costs of the 6-core CPUs. Xeon systems from companies such as Dell, require Windows 10 Pro for Workstations licenses – as per Microsoft requirements, and the standard licenses are only for 4-core CPUs. Since these new systems are 6-cores, it requires the 4-core Plus license, which is an additional $100 over the standard workstation license. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a huge sum for a handful of workstations, but it is another factor to the cost to take into consideration.