Intel Xeons Running Great On MSI's X99 Motherboard With Linux
The Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 is a Haswell processor with ten physical cores plus Hyper Threading to yield a total of 20 logical threads. The Xeon E5-2687W v3 has a total of 25MB of L2 cache, 3.1GHz base frequency, and 3.5GHz turbo frequency. The TDP of the processor is 160 Watts. This high-end processor is priced at $2145 USD.
The E5-1680 v3 is an eight-core processor plus Hyper Threading (16 threads) with a 3.2GHz base frequency and 3.8GHz turbo frequency. The TDP on this processor is 140 Watts and is Haswell based. The cache size on this eight-core processor is 20MB. This processor is priced at $1723 USD.
Both of these processors are compatible with the MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard, the same used for the Haswell-E testing with the Intel Core i7 5960X processor. You'll just want to make sure you're running the very latest BIOS. As said in the MSI X99S SLI PLUS review, it plays well under Linux and with these Xeon processors it's no different. These Xeon engineering samples were kindly provided for Linux testing by MSI, which through Phoronix is now looking to expand its Linux presence.
My full review on the Xeon E5-1680 v3 and Xeon E5-2687W v3 will be published on Phoronix in the coming days with a horde of performance benchmarks. If you're anxious to see how the E5-2687W v3 performs with its ten physical cores plus Hyper Threading on an X99 motherboard, I uploaded some comparison results against the i7-5960X. You can find the preview numbers on OpenBenchmarking.org. Again, more data is forthcoming on Phoronix. If you want to see how your own system compares, install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1411053-PTS-INTELX9936. If you have any other Linux test requests or benchmarks for these Xeon CPUs under Linux, feel free to post in the forums to let me know.
