Moore’s Law may be becoming harder for the semiconductor industry to follow, but Intel Corp. keeps finding ways of increasing its chips’ computational power.

The hardware giant maker on Thursday unveiled a new addition to its Xeon chip lineup that is hailed as its most powerful CPU to date. Dubbed the E7-8894 v4, the model is based on Intel’s latest 14-nanometer semiconductor architecture and packs 24 cores, compared with its predecessor’s 18. Moreover, the base clock speed has been increased from 2.2GHz to 2.4GHz, a frequency that can be further raised to 3.4GHz using the Turbo Boost technology the company ships with its high-end products.

The resulting performance boost is substantial. According to Intel, the E7-8894 v4 can run 25-50 percent faster than the previous chip in the series depending on how it’s used. The company further claims that the processor has set no fewer than four new industry performance records during internal testing.

Intel’s engineers have managed to pack this horsepower into the E7-8894 v4 without having to noticeably increase cooling requirements, which should be a boon for server makers. But while the chip’s thermal profile is the same as its lower performance predecessor, the price tag isn’t. The model will sell for $8,898, which according to Computerworld makes it the most expensive model in Intel’s entire lineup.

For comparison, the company’s next most expensive processor comes in at $7,174 while its fastest supercomputing chip, the Xeon Phi 7290F, trails behind at $6,401. The E7-8894 v4’s steep price tag reflects its target audience: deep-pocketed enterprises that are willing to pay extra for performance.

Intel said up to eight E7-8894 v4 processors can fit in a single server along with 24 terabytes of memory. The chip sees such beefy machines coming handy for running large databases, in-memory analytics software and other resource-intensive workloads that normally have to be distributed across multiple machines.

The E7-8894 v4 is the first in several groundbreaking processors that Intel plans to launch this year. Most notably, the company plans to release new iterations of its Xeon and Xeon Phi processors that are specifically designed for running deep learning workloads. Intel is banking on these new additions to up the ante against Nvidia Corp., which has gained a lot of market share in 2016 by targeting artificial intelligence adopters.

Image courtesy of Intel