Intel Xeon E5-4603 v2 

The ultra-high-end enthusiast also wants all the bells and whistles, such as overclockability, a good range of DRAM speed support and top quality construction materials.

My goal was to find out where these two CPUs stand in what I consider ‘an enthusiast user’s scenario’, and as such we used the same benchmarks as in the AMD Kaveri launch article, involving gaming, compression, rendering, video conversion and 2D image to 3D modeling creation.

Beyond two times better performance power, Intel is promising a few other upgrades with the next generation of this data-focused chipset, including triple the memory capacity, four times the I/O bandwidth and the potential to reduce total cost of ownership by up to 80 percent.

There was also talk of 40W, 1.4GHz models at ISSCC but they have not been announced yet.

This should be the first time since Sandy Bridge-E (2011) that expensive PCs get a healthy boost to single-threaded performance, clock for clock.

Heading into the third quarter, we should see Haswell-E make an appearance for the enthusiast desktop and moderately high-end server.

2.8 GHz Turbo Frequency (though the design will scale to 3.8 GHz).

Judging by the available information, it would seem that Intel are preparing a stack of ‘Ivytown’ processors along this design, and thus a range of Xeon E7 processors, from 1.4 GHz to 3.8 GHz, drawing between 40W and 150W, similar to the Xeon E5 v2 range.