Intel's new Xeon CPUs aim to deliver a revolution in video streaming

Xeon E3-1500 Tom's hardware credit

Intel has unveiled its new Xeon E3-1500 v5 range of Skylake-based processors which are designed to be a cost-effective solution for streaming video and other graphics-heavy applications.

As the company notes, video now accounts for something like 80% of all internet traffic, and service providers can make use of the new Xeon CPUs – which carry integrated Iris Pro Graphics P580 – rather than going to the expense of a discrete graphics card solution.

Intel boasts that the new Xeon E3-1500 v5 range offers up to 26% more 'overall graphics performance' than the previous generation (E3-1200 v4) in terms of remote application delivery for the likes of complex CAD apps in virtualised environments.

And when it comes to heavy duty media processing in the cloud, it's capable of delivering up to 18 AVC streams or eight HEVC streams at 30 fps full HD, or going up to 4K resolution, it can achieve two HEVC streams at 30 fps.

Also note that the CPUs paired with Intel's C236 series chipset can be hooked up with faster memory, supporting up to 64GB of DDR4 running at 2133 MHz.

Five SKUs

There are five SKUs in the Xeon E3-1500 v5 family, three of them pitched at data centre usage (being optimised for performance) and two aimed at media processing (optimised for reliability).

The E3-1585 v5 is the top-end data centre offering with a clock speed of 3.5GHz and turbo up to 3.9GHz with a TDP of 65W. For media processing duties, the top dog is the E3-1578L v5 with a clock speed of 2GHz and turbo up to 3.4GHz, with a TDP of 45W.

The company further notes that the range offers Intel Graphics Virtualization Technologies (GVT) which allows for the sharing of a CPU's resources between designers or engineers with the inclusion of a new option on this front: GVT -g. This lets up to 7 different users share the resources of a single processor simultaneously (alongside GVT -s, which supports a large number of users across common apps such as Office).

Intel observed: "The increased graphics capabilities offered by the Intel Xeon E3-1500 v5 family enable complex, 3D applications to be delivered remotely to multiple end devices from secure public and private cloud data centres – unleashing the professional 'creator' and enabling greater collaboration among the global workforce."

Image and Via: Tom's Hardware

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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