The Intel Xeon E5-1600 v4 series is a new family of Broadwell-EP CPUs primarily designed for single CPU workstations, such as the HP Z440.
The CPUs should be of particular interest to CAD users because of a new Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 which is designed to boost performance of frequency bound applications like CAD by increasing the performance of one or two of the CPU’s cores.
With this feature enabled, Intel says the foreground application (or any application the user chooses) gets an extra boost of performance – up to 200 MHz – by getting up to two cores running in Turbo Boost dedicated to it. For example, if you have an 8-core processor, two of the 8 cores will run at up to 4.0 GHz and be dedicated to that application.
To help users “pin” their applications to the “fast” cores that support these higher frequencies Intel provides a driver/utility package. It’s then a case of creating a profile and specifying which application .EXE will be assigned to which cores and at what utilization threshold.
Intel says the new processor delivers up to 1.6x more application throughput performance than a 4-year workstation based on the same Xeon E5-1600 processor line.
There are five models in total ranging from 3.20GHz to 3.70GHz with 4, 6 and 8 cores.
While the quad core models are best suited to pure CAD, the 6 and 8 core models should be of particular interest to those who use multi-threaded simulation or rendering tools, as well as CAD.
Intel Xeon E5-1620 v4 (3.50 GHz) (4 cores)
Intel Xeon E5-1630 v4 (3.70 GHz) (4 cores)
Intel Xeon E5-1650 v4 (3.60 GHz) (6 cores)
Intel Xeon E5-1660 v4 (3.20 GHz) (8 cores)
Intel Xeon E5-1680 v4 (3.40 GHz) (8 cores)