Intel Announces New Entry-Level Xeon E-2100 Family

When Intel revamped its Xeon product branding last year with the Xeon Scalable Processor family, it didn’t replace its entire Xeon lineup in one fell swoop. Entry-level Xeons were still tied to the old E3 v6 family and were explicitly based on Kaby Lake (7th Gen) Intel cores, rather than the higher core-count Coffee Lake chips that Intel launched in the consumer space. Today, the company is updating its entry-level Xeon platform with a new brand and model range. The new Xeon E-2100 family is the result.

The new SKUs run the gamut of TDPs — though keep in mind that Intel’s TDP figures are given under the assumption that the CPU is running at its stock clock and do not reflect power consumption under load. The parts themselves top out at 4.7GHz maximum turbo and generally conform to the Coffee Lake SKUs Intel has launched, though there are more Xeon E-2100 CPUs  than there are entries in the 8th Gen Core i7, i5, or i3 individual families. Parts marked with a double ** above lack Hyper-Threading — it’s not clear why Intel is turning that capability off at all in a Xeon part — while not all CPUs have onboard graphics. According to Intel, these differences are just to hit specific target markets. The company sometimes releases specific Xeons with larger amounts of L3 per CPU core, but it hasn’t done that here — quad-core chips have 8MB, while six-core CPUs have 12MB.

Other features, like the PCIe lane support, require additional explanation. In the past, Intel has sometimes outfitted its higher-end systems with more PCIe lanes than its desktop parts; some Core X CPUs have more PCI Express lanes than your standard Core i7-8700K . That’s not the case here, however. Up to 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity are provided to the CPU for GPU connectivity, with the rest of the lanes hanging off the southbridge and connected to the CPU via a DMI connection equivalent to an x4 PCIe 3.0 lane. This shouldn’t bottleneck anyone considering a Xeon E system, but there’s no additional feature support here, either.

Entry-level Xeon customers should see a significant performance improvement from the new Xeon E-2100 family compared with older Xeon E3 v6 CPUs. The addition of extra CPU cores and higher top-line frequencies will provide the same overall performance improvement to Xeon that the Core family has already benefited from. The jump between Xeon E-2100 and Xeon E3v6 should be roughly equivalent to the gains we saw between Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake.