Intel's “Secret” Socket 1356 CPUs

Intel's Xeon E5 and E3 socket LGA 1356 processors have been out and about for a while, but so have four chips that people may not have heard of, due to Intel's deliberate secrecy.

Of course, “secrecy” may be laying it on thick a bit, since the Santa Clara, California-based company didn't actually wage a covert war or anything. The corporation did do something odd though: it chose not to include a pair of Pentium chips, as well as two Xeons, in its roadmap. Chances are that Intel developed them for specific clients and didn't see the need to shout their existence from the rooftops. On the flip side, having a 20 MB cache CPU and not talking about it is rather strange.

That's right, there is an unannounced processor with 20 MB of L3 cache. It is named Xeon E5-2449L and has eight cores. Hyper threading technology turns those 8 cores into 16 threads and there is even Turbo Boost support, which means that the base clock, 1.4 GHz, can be pushed to 1.8 GHz in a pinch. The TDP (thermal design power) of the E5-2449L is 50W. The second “secret” Xeon is called E5-1410, has four cores and eight threads, 10 MB of cache and speeds of 2.8 GHz base and 3.2 GHz Turbo. The TDP is 80W.

The other two CPUs are called Pentium 1403 and Pentium 1407. Both of them are dual-core models with 5 MB L3 cache and TDPs of 80W. The former works at 2.6 GHz, while the latter boasts a frequency of 2.8 GHz. Neither has Turbo Boost. The two Xeon units can handle dual processing (two of them can operate on a dual-socket motherboard), but the Pentiums lack this capability. Unfortunately, we don't know what prices Intel has slapped on these four chips, even though they are being shipped as part of Dell workstations, including Dell PowerEdge R320.

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