Intel may be the world’s largest chipmaker, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hope to boost corporate sales with its first new version in several years, the new Xeon 7-series processor. This, of course, means a moving out of Intel’s long-reigning Xeon E7 “Westmere-EX”. Allegedly, these “Ivy Bridge-EX” Xeons were expected late 2013, instead they arrived in three series: two socket E7-2800, four-socket E7-4800, and eight-socket E7-8800. Meant to reinvigorate the server computer enterprise, Intel pointed out that chip sales have been falling short. With cloud data-center operators surging 35 percent, and server chips only 7 percent in 2013, there’s an obvious clue why Intel finally made a move. Better late than never?

With an average of 2 times the performance over previous versions, this chip series is meant for crunching big time data. The family is ready to support up to 32-socket servers, with 15 cores, each having clock rates of 2.2 to 2.8GHz. Additionally, each of these 15 cores is co-located with 2.5MB of last level cache (LLC), meaning a full capacity of 37.5MB of LLC. Important to note, these cache slices are not limited to their associated cores. Instead they form a conformed LLC, each having their very own “core’s clock”. In other words, it’s more or less a “three ring business”, where all parties communicate.

The unified LLC system is said to max out at 450GB/sec of LLC bandwidth per socket. Doesn’t that sound like something worth waiting for? Latency in this communication is 15.5 nanoseconds, top-of-the-line, says Intel. This series should also encourage other companies to replace their old servers. The amount of data generation demanded by Internet-ready devices and services will require such capacities.

Other designs will also benefit from the new processors. According to Mercury Research, “ the new processor line will allow Intel to take better aim at other designs, such as International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)’s Power chips”. These account for more than 40 percent of revenue, and could give Intel the opportunity to increase their very own market share. All in all, Intel’s game plan with its Xeon E7’s could mean increased prevalence in the Internet of Things market, which is expected to grow to over 30 billion devices by 2020. Intel also forecasts that “big data and advanced analytics is supposed to be worth roughly $32.4 billion by 2017”. Thus, even more reason to believe in Intel’s Xeon portfolio. Its latest and greatest attempt to help solve big problems in an easier, quicker manner is by doing the real-time number crunching for us.