Quote:One of the interesting omissions from the re-release of Xeon E a couple of weeks ago were the 8-core versions. Intel reiterated its 4-core and 6-core parts, and given the recent release of 8-core processors for consumers we were expecting to see 8-core parts hit the primetime for the commercial market as well. Intel doesn’t officially comment on potential future parts, however one of Intel’s partners has a pair of Xeon E 8-core processors listed in the QVL section of one of its new C242/C246 motherboards.

The new processors are listed as ‘ES’, or engineering samples. Normally the final stage ES processors, we believe to be called ‘ES1/ES2’ parts in Intel internal lingo, are the step before full commercial products, listed as QS. These parts have an almost full range of specifications listed, as follows:

Neither parts have names listed in the QVL list, although we hazard a guess that if they both follow the current naming scheme for Xeon E, the top end model without integrated graphics will be the E-2188 and the secondary one will be the E-2138. This means that E-21 for the family, the final digit for the number of cores, and the third digit for its position in the stack.