Today, as Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) launches the third generation of its Xeon E5 dual-CPU platform, many eyes are on the improvements it brings to the servers in the datacenter. However, the benefits are just as high – if not higher – on the high-end workstation front.

First of all, Haswell core means sped-up AVX floating point, by inclusion of fused multiply-add (FMA) ops for theoretical FP rate doubling in benchmarks like Linpack, for instance. Haswell’s AVX2 also, just as importantly, moves integer processing to the wide parallel AVX engines, essentially offloading anything aside the address calculations to the RISC-like, three-address AVX instruction format and wide register sets. For workstation apps, once re-compiled to take advantage of it, the benefits could be enormous, and also be another gradual move away from the antiquated X86 code base.

Then, the wide choice of a number of cores per SKU – from 8 all the way to 18 – enables you to pick the right balance of per-core speed (i.e. per-thread performance) and core number, depending on the parallelism of your application. Some apps scale less well across many cores, thus preferring high per-core speed, while others like ray tracing make the most out of many cores.

The initial workstation SKU in the Xeon-E5 v3 range, the E5 2687W v3 flavor, is a 3.1 GHz 10-core part that actually uses the 12-core die where 2 cores (and their associated caches) were turned off. Now, its predecessor, the 2687Wv2 on the Ivy Bridge platform, had full L3 caches even if some cores of the die were disabled, a benefit that, I guess, we will only see back in Broadwell-EP (E5 v4) SKUs next year.

Then we come to DDR4 – yes the initial DIMMs aren’t exactly speedy, especially latency-wise, but the lower voltage and other reliability features of DDR4, together with quick improvements in speed and latency expected over the next few quarters, should provide the users the never-before seen capacity on a dual-socket workstation, beyond 1.5 TB RAM, without sacrificing the bandwidth on high load situations like DDR3.

The improvements in the PCIe bandwidth, integrated voltage regulation, and sped-up QPI to 9.6 GT/s also round out the key extra benefits.

Putting it through its paces

Here we look at the initial reference workstation based on this SKU from Intel, packaged by BOXX. The machine itself is compact, using liquid cooling on a SuperMicro X10DAi workstation mainboard with three PCIe x16 v3 slots. This doesn’t max out the platforms theoretical quad-GPU full bandwidth capability, but should be enough for most users. In return, the board has space for 16 DDR4 DIMMs, i.e. a full terabyte of RAM if using 64 GB modules available early next year. The installed RAM was 128 GB, in 8 pcs of Samsung 16 GB ECC DDR4-2133 RDIMMs.

The system came with a Nvidia Quadro K2000, which I changed to AMD FirePro W9100, arguably the most powerful professional OpenGL card available as of today. With 16 GB VRAM and six DisplayPort outputs, the card is able to drive even 8K displays like the one from BOE Technology that we mentioned last week. Intel’s 240 GB + 400 GB (SATA + PCIe) SSD combo completed the picture.

The first benchmark was the brand new SPECwpc all-encompassing workstation productivity benchmark by SPEC, on this system. The suite, which takes a couple hours to run, covers everything from processor to graphics (a.k.a ViewPerf) to overall system performance, and seems to do the job with much less trouble than, for instance, BAPcO SysMark did years ago on the PCs.

Here are the first SPECwpc results, on the dual 3.1 GHz E5-2687W v3 system:

Next, we ran CineBench 15 – note that the system is about twice as fast as an overclocked 4+ GHz Core i7-5960X, the desktop Haswell-E brethren to these Xeons.

In CPU-Z, you can see the data about the CPU.

Then we come to the newest version of SiSoft Sandra. Here is the report on the key performance data.

In our next round, we will be focusing on the changes in performance obtained when changing – and tuning – the main memory, as well as looking at the opportunity for even higher CPU speed. In my own opinion, the workstation market can easily justify higher TDP – and maybe even unlocked – Xeons, especially in both 8 core and 18 core per socket configurations.

This post originally appeared on VR World.

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As more and more X99 motherboards leak, it only made sense to release a portion of the trove of boards that haven’t already been announced or leaked.

The Asus X99-E WS, a Bright Side of News* exclusive, is a particularly interesting one because it is Asus’ (TPE:2357) latest high performance motherboard for workstation users. Because X99 is an entirely new platform there are very likely going to be a lot of people searching for new workstation boards like the X99-E WS to upgrade their workstations.

In terms of features, you get all the expected things like Haswell-E support, a plethora of PCIe 3.0 slots, which includes support for 4-way CrossFireX and SLI with X16 links. This board is specifically designed to support both Core i7 and Xeon E5 class chips (including the E5-1600, thanks to retailer leaks) thanks to being only a single socket workstation board. Because this is a workstation board, ASUS also talks about the boards overall power efficiency focusing on their Dr. MOS, 12k hour capacitors, ProCool power connector and beat thermal choke.

The Asus X99-E WS also has a Q-code logger and Dr. Power, even though it also has a plethora of connectivity which make it all the more attractive. That includes dual Gigabit NICs, a whopping 10 USB 3.0 connectors on the rear IO alone, not to mention the standard audio connectors, eSATA and the expected IO. You will get the full 8-slot DDR4 configuration, which is to be expected even though you very likely won’t get much memory overclocking support like the Rampage series of boards.

Asus X99-E WS IO

In addition to all of this, you will be getting backed by an Asus 3 year warranty which brings the MSRP price of this board to a whopping $519. Yes, this is a fairly high price for a single socketed board that isn’t an overclocking board, but X99 is a performance platform and this is a workstation board which should mean you are paying for higher quality components and reliability.

In fact, some retailers already have it available for pre-order but don’t really have any details or pictures of the board. So, you can already get it for $499 via some retailers, already lower than the $519 MSRP.

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