Abit information about the next Xeon E3 line-up dubbed Skylake by Intel. The new Skylake LGA1151 processors are expected to support DDR4 Reggistered memory, moving away from Unregistered memory which is what the current generation Xeon E3 v3 processors use. Current samples have had a similar dual memory controllers (DDR3/DDR4) design like Haswell-EP, Broadwell-DE and Haswell-EX from what we have heard. We expected the move towards DDR4 but the change to RDIMM is another step forward.


Why the change?

The main advantage of course is memory capacity, potentiailly offering upto 128GB/256GB of memory support (Using 32GB or even 64GB DIMM's) with only 4 DIMM slots. The current Haswell Xeon E3 V3 generation only supports a maxmium of 32GB so Skylake Xeon E3 could offer a significant step forward right off the bat. Today’s workloads are increasingly memory bound so an increase from a 8GB (practical) memory module/ slot limit to a 32GB/64GB memory module per slot format on Intel Skylake platforms is welcome.

This has always been one of the limiting factors of the E3 platform, while it does support ECC UDIMM (Their desktop Core i3,i5 and i7 doesn't) most of the plaform has been derived from desktop and mobile parts. It has at times forced users to upgrade to the more expensive Xeon E5 platform due to the fact that they simply needed more memory capacity even they did not require a more performance intensive CPU.

Should this become the reality once Skylake is released, then it will well and truely shift DDR4 RDIMM memory to become the norm as all three of Intel's Xeon platforms, E3, E5 and E7 would be supporting reggistered DDR4 memory. 

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