Lenovo joins Intel custom business with new Xeon CPU

Intel Xeon processor
Intel is betting big on the Xeon processor range.

Lenovo has announced that it partnered with Intel to produce its own Xeon, the E5-2698A v3. Oracle (the E7-8890 v2) and Amazon (E5-2666 v3) have already announced similar partnerships and it looks like others will follow as well.

The proliferation of SKUs is going to make it more difficult to compare systems directly since these processors are customised for one vendor and the actual specs are not disclosed.

Lenovo says that its Xeon is the highest-performing two-socket server platform - when installed with Water Cool Technology (WCT) - allowing it to reach a whopping 1.083 teraflops.

The chip looks like a variant of the existing E5-2698 v3, a 16-core Haswell based model that is clocked at 2.3GHz with a turbo-boosted speed of 3.6GHz. Lenovo says that its model can only reach 3.2GHz with turbo mode enabled.

Lenovo's new chip will only be available in specially designed servers such as its own NeXtScale system, which it says cuts power consumption at CPU level by six percent and at data-centre level by more than 40 percent.

The launch was done at Supercomputing 2014 where the Chinese company showcased a petaflop computer that is only three cubic metres announced that it was going to open a HPC innovation center in Stuttgart Germany.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.