Intel Xeon E5-2670 vs Intel Xeon E5-2696 v2

Xeon E5-2670 vs Xeon E5-2696 v2 specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Xeon E5-2696 v2 beats the Xeon E5-2670 in overall performance. Despite this, the Xeon E5-2670 has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Xeon E5-2696 v2 has significantly more cores with 12 cores compared to the Xeon E5-2670 that has 8 cores. It also has more threads than the Xeon E5-2670.

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Xeon E5-2670 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.