A couple of things have changed since the last iteration that was Westmere-EX. For one the previous only supported upto 10 cores where as Xeon E7 v2 is 15 cores (duh). Also the Xeon E7 v2 populates the 32 Socket servers. Comparing westmere-ex to ivy bridge-ex we get the following.
Intel’s upcoming Xeon E7 ‘Ivy Bridge-EX’ lineup launches this year which delivers an unprecedented amounts of performance for HPC needs. Intel is preparing their flagship Xeon E7-8890 V2 chip codenamed Ivytown which is the first chip from Intel to boast a core count of 15 coming one step closer to AMD’s Opteron 6300 series which has 16 cores on the top most model.
The chip features an insane 4.31 billion transistors and a massive die size of 541mm2 with a modular architecture which splits the cores into blocks of three, each block has five cores with their own L3 cache, embedded ring bus and I/O. This modular architecture would scale from top to bottom of the Xeon E7 lineup with Intel shifting and removing the columns to offer cost effective SKUs. The chip features 37.5 MB L3 cache and a TDP of 155 Watts. According to the rumor mill, the flagship part could cost well over $5000 US. In an 8 Socket environment, eight of these chips would amount to 120 cores and 240 threads with a 300 MB cache shared via QPI v1.1. The frequency of the chip is toned down to 2.8 GHz but there are tons of models ranging in core configuration and clock speeds which can be found in the specification chart posted at the end of this article.
Read more: http://wccftech.com/ivy-bridge-ex-arrives-intel-xeon-e7-v2-released/#ixzz3KHt3XslX