Xeon E5-2603: specs and benchmarks
Aggregate performance score
Xeon E5-2603 provides poor benchmark performance at 1.40% of a leader's which is a 128-core EPYC 9755.
Contents
Summary
Intel started Xeon E5-2603 sales 6 March 2012 at a recommended price of $207. This is a Sandy Bridge-EP architecture desktop processor primarily aimed at office systems. It has 4 cores and 4 threads, and is based on 32 nm manufacturing technology, with a maximum frequency of 1800 MHz and a locked multiplier.
Compatibility-wise, this is FCLGA2011 processor with a TDP of 80 Watt. It supports DDR3 memory.
Primary details
Xeon E5-2603 processor market type (desktop or notebook), architecture, sales start time and pricing.
| Place in the ranking | 2363 | |
| Place by popularity | not in top-100 | |
| Cost-effectiveness evaluation | 0.13 | |
| Market segment | Server | |
| Power efficiency | 0.70 | of 100.00 (Apple M4 (8 cores)) |
| Designer | Intel | |
| Manufacturer | Intel | |
| Architecture codename | Sandy Bridge-EP (2012) | |
| Release date | 6 March 2012 (13 years ago) | |
| Launch price (MSRP) | $207 | of 17,906 (Xeon Platinum 8280L) |
Cost-effectiveness evaluation
Performance per price, higher is better.
Performance to price scatter graph
Detailed specifications
Basic microprocessor parameters such as number of cores, number of threads, base frequency and turbo boost clock, lithography, cache size and multiplier lock state. These parameters can generally indicate CPU performance, but to be more precise you have to review its test results.
| Physical cores | 4 (Quad-Core) | |
| Threads | 4 | |
| Base clock speed | 1.8 GHz | of 4.7 GHz (FX-9590) |
| Boost clock speed | 1.8 GHz | of 6.2 GHz (Core i9-14900KS) |
| Bus rate | 6.4 GT/s | |
| L1 cache | 64 KB (per core) | of 80 KB (EPYC 9965) |
| L2 cache | 256 KB (per core) | |
| L3 cache | 10240 KB (shared) | of 1152 MB (EPYC 9684X) |
| Chip lithography | 32 nm | of 3 nm (Apple M3 Max 16-Core) |
| Die size | 294 mm2 | |
| Maximum core temperature | 70 °C | of 110 °C (Atom x7-E3950) |
| Number of transistors | 1,270 million | of 135,240 million (EPYC 9684X) |
| 64 bit support | + | |
| Windows 11 compatibility | - |
Compatibility
Information on Xeon E5-2603 compatibility with other computer components and devices: motherboard (look for socket type), power supply unit (look for power consumption) etc. Useful when planning a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. Note that power consumption of some processors can well exceed their nominal TDP, even without overclocking. Some can even double their declared thermals given that the motherboard allows to tune the CPU power parameters.
| Number of CPUs in a configuration | 2 | of 8 (Opteron 842) |
| Socket | FCLGA2011 | |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 80 Watt | of 500 Watt (Xeon 6960P) |
Technologies and extensions
Technological capabilities and additional instructions supported by Xeon E5-2603. You'll probably need this information if you require some particular technology.
| Instruction set extensions | Intel® AVX | |
| AES-NI | + | |
| AVX | + | |
| Enhanced SpeedStep (EIST) | + | |
| Turbo Boost Technology | - | |
| Hyper-Threading Technology | - | |
| Idle States | + | |
| Thermal Monitoring | + | |
| Flex Memory Access | - | |
| Demand Based Switching | + |
Security technologies
Processor technologies aimed at improving security, for example, by protecting against hacks.
| TXT | + | |
| EDB | + |
Virtualization technologies
Supported virtual machine optimization technologies. Some are specific to Intel only, some to AMD.
| VT-d | + | |
| VT-x | + | |
| EPT | + |
Memory specs
Types, maximum amount and channel number of RAM supported by Xeon E5-2603's memory controller. Depending on the motherboard, higher memory frequency may be supported.
| Supported memory types | DDR3 | |
| Maximum memory size | 384 GB | of 6 TiB (EPYC 9124) |
| Max memory channels | 4 | of 12 (Xeon Platinum 9221) |
| Maximum memory bandwidth | 34.1 GB/s | of 460.8 GB/s (EPYC 9124) |
| ECC memory support | + |
Peripherals
Specifications and connection types of supported peripherals.
| PCIe version | 3.0 | of 5.0 (Core i9-12900K) |
| PCI Express lanes | 40 | of 144 (Threadripper PRO 7955WX) |
Benchmark performance
Single-core and multi-core benchmark results of Xeon E5-2603. Overall benchmark performance is measured in points in 0-100 range, higher is better.
Combined synthetic benchmark score
This is our combined benchmark performance rating.
Passmark
Passmark CPU Mark is a widespread benchmark, consisting of 8 different types of workload, including integer and floating point math, extended instructions, compression, encryption and physics calculation. There is also one separate single-threaded scenario measuring single-core performance. Other than that, Passmark measures multi-core performance.
GeekBench 5 Single-Core
GeekBench 5 Single-Core is a cross-platform application developed in the form of CPU tests that independently recreate certain real-world tasks with which to accurately measure performance. This version uses only a single CPU core.
GeekBench 5 Multi-Core
GeekBench 5 Multi-Core is a cross-platform application developed in the form of CPU tests that independently recreate certain real-world tasks with which to accurately measure performance. This version uses all available CPU cores.
Send your test results of Xeon E5-2603.
AMD equivalent
According to our data, the closest AMD alternative to Xeon E5-2603 is Opteron 3260 HE, which is slower by 2% and lower by 18 positions in our ranking.
Here are some closest AMD rivals to Xeon E5-2603:
Similar processors
Here is our recommendation of several processors that are more or less close in performance to the one reviewed.
Recommended GPUs
People consider these graphics cards to be good for Xeon E5-2603, according to our PC configuration statistics.
These are the fastest graphics cards for Xeon E5-2603 in our user configuration statistics. There is a total of 16 configurations using Xeon E5-2603 in our database.
