Intel Launches Skylake Xeon E3-1200 V5 Series

Intel Launches Skylake Xeon E3-1200 V5 Series

Intel has no officially launched their Skylake based Xeon E3-1200 V5 “Greenlow” family of CPUs, offering 11 new Skylake Xeon CPUs which will make their way to market in 2016. 

These CPUs will feature 20 Gen 3 PCIe lanes, which is a major upgrade over Skylake’s mainstream variants and features Intel’s faster Iris and Iris Pro Graphics and can contain Intel’s eDRAM. Some of these Xeon chips will not contain a GPU component, which will be helpful for lower power applications and is capable of using DDR4 memory. 

One of the largest differences between this generation of Xeon CPUs when compared to it’s previous generation counterparts, most notably the inability to use these CPUs with mainstream motherboards from Intel’s 100-series of Skylake ready motherboards.

These CPUs can only be used on Intel’s new Greenlow platform, which uses Intel’s C230 Series chipsets which offers DDR4 support and offers 20 lanes of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth.  

It is a shame that these new Xeon CPUs will not work with mainstream motherboards, as in the past I have seen plenty of people use Xeon CPUs on mainstream chipsets. 

Intel this generation must have decided that an enterprise CPU must be paired with an enterprise motherboard, which makes a lot of sense from a compatibility standpoint, especially when it comes to validating mainstream motherboards.

You can join the discussion on Intel’s Skylake Xeon E3-1200 V5 CPUs on the OC3D Forums. 

Intel new Skylake Xeon E3-1200 V5 Series won’t work on mainstream motherboards. https://t.co/mUTaHgqCuh pic.twitter.com/KXKd2f46Ad

— OC3D (@OC3D) October 20, 2015