Intel's approach to naming Xeon CPUs is pretty annoying

June 14, 2019

Suppose, hypothetically, that someone offers to pass on to you (by which I mean your group) an old server or two, and casually says that they have 'Xeon E7-4830' CPUs. Do you want the machines?

Well, that depends. As I found out in the process of writing yesterday's entry on the effects of MDS on our server fleet, a Xeon that is called an 'E7-4830' may be anything from a first generation Westmere CPU from 2011 up to (so far) a Broadwell CPU from 2016, the 'E7-4830 v4'. Intel has recycled the 'E7-4830' label for at least four different CPUs so far, the original, v2 (Ivy Bridge, from 2014), v3 (Haswell, 2015), and the most recent v4. These are not just minor iterations; they have had variations in core count, processor base and turbo frequencies, cache size, CPU socket used, and supported memory and memory speeds.

These days, they also have differences in microcode availability for various Intel CPU weaknesses, since Westmere generation CPUs will not be updated for MDS at all. I'd guess that Intel will provide microcode security updates for future issues for Ivy Bridge (v2) for a few years more, since it's from 2014 and that's fairly recent as these things go, but no one can be sure of anything except that there will probably be more vulnerabilities discovered and more microcode updates needed. This makes the difference between the various versions potentially much more acute and significant.

All of these different E7-4830's are very much not different versions of the same product, unless you re-define 'product' to be 'a marketing segment label'. An E7-4830 v4 is not a substitute for another version, except in the generic sense that any Xeon with ECC is a substitute for another one. Instead of being product names, Intel has made at least some of their Xeon CPU names into essentially brands or sub-brands. This is really rather confusing if you don't know what's going on (because you are not that immersed in the Xeon world) and so do not know how critical the presence or omission of the 'vN' bit of the CPU name is.

(It would be somewhat better if Intel labeled the first iteration as 'Xeon E7-4830 v1', especially in things like the names that the CPUs themselves return. As I discovered in the process of researching all of this, the CPU name information shown in places like Linux's /proc/cpuinfo doesn't come from a mapping table in software; instead, this 'model name', 'brand name' or 'brand string' is directly exposed by the processor through one use of the CPUID instruction.)

This is of course not unique to the E7-4830, or even Xeon E7s in general. The Xeon E5 and E3 lines also have their duplicate CPU names. In a casual search to confirm this, I was particularly struck with the E3-1225, which exists in original, v2, v3, v5, and v6 versions, but apparently not in v4 (although the Intel MDS PDF does list some Xeon E3 v4 CPUs).

Written on 14 June 2019.
« Intel's MDS issues have now made some old servers almost completely useless to us
Some notes on Intel's CPUID and how to get it for your CPUs »

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Last modified: Fri Jun 14 22:02:17 2019
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