Intel officially announced its next-generation Xeon processors at IDF Beijing today. The new lineup includes the Haswell-based Xeon E3 1200 V3 family on the low end, and the Ivy Bridge-EP Xeon E5 and Ivy Bridge-EX Xeon E7 aimed at the mid-range general purpose and high-end HPC markets respectively. Intel did not disclose pricing or details on the new chips (such as core counts, cache, clockspeeds, number of SKUs etc.). However, the x86 chip giant did state that the new chips are coming later this year as well as teasing a few tidbits of information on the new Xeon chips.

The upcoming Xeon E3 processors will be part of the Xeon E3 1200 V3 family. These chips will be based on Haswell and are limited to one socket per board. Thanks to the Haswell architecture, Intel has managed to reduce power consumption by approximately 25% and increase video transcoding performance by about 25%. There will be at least one Xeon E3 1200 V3 series chip with a 13W TDP, for example.

Intel is also releasing a new media software development kit (SDK) for Linux and Windows machines that will provide a common platform for developers. It has allowed Intel to maximize the use of both the CPU and GPU for HD video transcoding as well as increasing the number of simultaneous video transcodes over previous generations. The new Xeon E3 1200 V3 (Haswell) chips will be available sometime before the end of 2013.

The next-generation Xeon E5 chips will be based on the 22nm Ivy Bridge-EP architecture. They will be positioned at general purpose computing in data centers (and possibly high-end workstations), and will be limited to 2 sockets per motherboard. The new Xeon E5 processors will incorporate Intel Secure Key and OS Guard technologies. OS Guard is the evolution of the company's existing Intel Execute Disable Bit security technology. Intel is also including AES-NI (AES-New Instructions), to improve the hardware acceleration of AES encrypt/decrypt operations. These mid-range Xeon chips will be available in Q3 2013.

Finally, the top-end Xeon E7 processors will be based on the 22nm Ivy Bridge-EX architecture. The upcoming processors are intended for high performance server and supercomputing applications where scalability and performance are important. The Ivy Bride-EX chips are compatible with motherboards that will have between 4 and 8 sockets and up to 12TB of RAM per node. Further, Intel has packed these processors with new RAS features, including Resilient System Technology and Resilient Memory Technology. The RAS features ensure stability and data integrity in calculations are maintained. Such features are important in scientific, real-time analytics, cloud computing, and banking applications, where performance and up-time are paramount and any errors could cost a company money. Intel has stated that the new Xeon E7 CPUs will be available in the fourth quarter of this year (Q4'13).

While I was hoping for more details as far as core count, clockspeeds, and pricing, the approximate release to market timeframe for the chips is known. Do you think you will be upgrading to the new Xeon chips later this year, or are your current processors fast enough for your server applications?

More information on the upcoming Xeon chips can be found in this Intel fact sheet (PDF).