CPU

The latest generation of CPUs are wonders of efficiency and processing power. This is useful since CPUs are one of the most power-hungry server components. However, efficiency comes at a price. In some business environments, the investment will pay for itself in months. But is your organisation one of them?

Given their market domination, Intel CPUs dictate advancing processor technology worldwide. Almost all new product on the market is made by Intel, regardless of the make of server it goes into (although AMD, IBM and Chinese initiative Qualcomm may change this in the future).

Intel’s recent focus has been on microarchitecture. This facilitates more cores within the CPU (up to 28 on the Xeon Scalable Processor that came out in 2017 from 22 on the Xeon Processor E5-2600 v4 that came out in 2016) and more threads per socket (up to 56 threads from 44 in the same models). The benefit of this is that although the processing speed on each thread is slower, a higher number means greater CPU efficiency. This results in lower electricity use and less heat generated.