As most people know, Intel adopt a Tick Tock model for processors development: a tick advances manufacturing technology, a tock delivers new microarchitecture. Usually this mean that a tick means processors with more frequency speed (sometimes also more cores and/or more cache) and a tock means usually new features (but not necessary more frequency speed and/or more cache/cores).

But when a new generation (tick or tock) as been introduced, after some months, this usually means cheaper processors (or at similar price) compared to previous generation.

Now a possible confusion could be generated by the Westmere family (the tick evolution of the Nehalem) that was probably much articulated with at least two big Xeon branch: the Westmere-EP (really simple to understand a just an evolution in speed of the previous models) and the Westmere-EX (the Xeon E7 series) that was much similar as a tock evolution.

To make things more complicated the tock evolution as been called Xeon E5, making diffult a comparison with the E7 (the old model) series, for several reasons: numbers does not help (E5 seems a system with lower feature compared to E7), cache is bigger on E7 (24 MB compared to 20MB), memory speed is limited on E7 (also compared with old Westmere-EP).

But price comparison is much interesting: if we compared a E5-2670 (Recommended Customer Price: $1552 – $1556) with a E7-4830 (Recommended Customer Price: $2059) price make the E5 solution much valuable (considering that also are mounted on new servers generations). With the only (little) disadvantage of the cache size. For a complate feature comparison see the datasheets at Intel web site:

For new processors (actually only for the desktop market) see also: Unofficial Intel Ivy Bridge CPU Datasheet.