The story behind the high-end Xeon has been the same for the past 5 years: Intels most expensive beats the Oracle alternative in every way you can look at it, and offers better performance per watt/dollar than the massive IBM Power servers. And each time a new generation of quad/octal socket Xeons is born, Intel increases the corecount, RAS features and performance per core while charging a lot more for the top SKUs. From the Intel side, this new generation is no different: more cores, better RAS, slightly more performance per core and ... higher prices.