Anticipation is building over the upcoming release of Intel’s new Xeon processor E5 family. Formally announced last November in 2011, Intel unveiled some impressive stats for the new E5 line: full integration support for the PCI Express 3.0 base (which is estimated to double interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe 2.0 specification), over twice the performance in raw floating point operations per second (FLOPS), and substantially greater real-HPC workloads compared to the Xeon 5600 series.

In the original Intel press release, the company announced that:

“Customer acceptance of the Intel Xeon E5 processor has exceeded our expectations and is driving the fastest debut on the TOP500 list of any processor in Intel’s history,” said Hazra. “Collecting, analyzing and sharing large amounts of information is critical to today’s science activities and requires new levels of processor performance and technologies designed precisely for this purpose.”

With their increasing movement into the HPC market, the release of the E5 processor series to the general public (they were shipped to a small number of cloud and HPC customers in September 2011) will help solidify Intel’s position in a specialized field of computing where their previous products have typically not done as well. At the time of Intel’s original press release, Xeon E5 processors were already powering 10 systems on the TOP500 supercomputers list, with over 20,000 of these processors in operation delivering a cumulative peak performance of over 3.4 petaflops. And, it is expected that the Xeon E5 processor family will power several other supercomputers in the future. In other words, this looks to be the beginning of something big for Intel in the realm of HPC.

A recent article from Computerworld has some good highlights on upcoming developments for the Xeon E5 launch:

Intel is actually cutting its server market into eight pieces with the Xeon E5 launch. That’s Itanium 9300s and Xeon 7500s and E7s at the high-end (and eventually the “Sandy Bridge-EX” E8s). That’s two segments of the market that share chipsets and memory cards, but that have different motherboards and sockets. At least until Intel finally delivers, as it is rumored to be in the works, the long-promised common Xeon-Itanium socket. That could happen with the E8s, but it is far more likely to happen with the “Ivy Bridge-EX” Xeon E9s years hence. At the low-end, there’s the single-socket Xeon E3 and Atom processors, depending on how wimpy or brawny your workload is. That’s four addressable server segments in total.

The Xeon E5s will also span four different server types and will cover the middle and overlap with the high and low ends. The Xeon E5-2600, as the first of the “Romley” server platforms are expected to be called, will use the “EP” variant of the Xeon E5 chip that plugs into the new “Socket R” CPU socket. This socket is not compatible with the current Xeon 5500 and 5600 processors, but has all sorts of goodies, including two QPI links between the processors, support for unregistered, registered, and load-reduced (LR) DDR3 main memory, and integrated PCI-Express 3.0 controllers on the processor. This is the chip that Intel has presumably been shipping under NDA to selected supercomputer and hyperscale data center customers since last fall. This chip is clearly aimed at two-socket Opteron 6200 machines.

For two-socket machines that don’t need all of these capabilities, Intel is expected to roll out its “Sandy Bridge-EN” chips, rumored to be called the Xeon E5-2400s. These chips will plug into the new “Socket B2″ socket and will sport only one QPI link between processors as well as fewer memory channels, fewer DIMMs per core, and fewer PCI-Express 3.0 slots. This chip is fired directly at two-socket Opteron 4200 iron.

If the rumors are right, then Intel will also ship a variant of the Sandy Bridge-EP chip that will be able to span four processor sockets in a single system image. This chip is expected to be called the Xeon E5-4600 and is obviously targeting the four-socket Opteron 6200.

Despite all of the excitement around the Xeon E5 series, this is only the most upcoming of Intel’s many launches this year. Check back next week when we will take a look at another one of Intel’s big plans: MIC.