Based on Intel® Core™ microarchitecture (code-named Broadwell) and manufactured on 14-nanometer process technology, the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v4 family has more cores and a larger cache size. It also has new features like Cache Allocation Technology, Memory Bandwidth Monitoring, and the new RDSEED instruction compared to the previous-generation Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v3 family.
For a more in-depth discussion of the key features and the architecture of the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v4 family see the technical overview document.
Key supported features you should be aware of as a software developer:
Faster integer instructions. Faster ADCX and ADOX instructions improve the performance of large-integer applications.
New instruction supporting cryptography. The new RDSEED instruction provides high-quality seed values for software pseudorandom number generators. This article shows the difference between RDRAND and RDSEED.
Intel® Resource Director Technology (Intel® RDT). Intel RDT Introduces three new features called Cache Allocation Technology (CAT), Memory Bandwidth Monitoring (MBM), and Code and Data Prioritization (CDP). CAT allows the OS to specify how much cache space an application can utilize, while MBM monitors how much memory bandwidth is utilized and CDP limits how much cache space data can utilize to make room for code in the last-level cache. The following articles will describe more about these cache features as well as their enabling and software support.
Introduction to Intel Resource Director Technology
Introduction to Cache Allocation Technology
Key Cache Allocation Technology Usage Models
Proof points for Cache Allocation Technology
Software enabling and support for Cache Allocation Technology
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/introduction-to-memory-bandwidth-monitoring
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/memory-bandwidth-monitoring-usage-models
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/memory-bandwidth-monitoring-proof-points
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/software-enabling-for-memory-bandwidth-monitoring
Learn more about the Intel Xeon processor E7 v4 family here. Also, these software vendors are already developing applications that are highly optimized to run on the Intel Xeon processor E7 v4 family server platform.