On March 6th 2014, Intel launched its new Intel Xeon E7 processor in Switzerland. CERN openlab was invited to give a keynote at the event, in which it presented an account of its experience with pre-production samples of the processor and the four-socket platform that hosts it. Andrzej Nowak talked about CERN's computing challenges, as well as technical results from an advanced evaluation of the system, equipped with E7-4890 v2 CPUs. Amongst the benchmarks used were long-standing openlab favourites such as HEPSPEC06, the multi-threaded Geant4 prototype and the MLFit data analysis prototype. At the same time, the openlab team worked with the CERN Physics department and the Platform & Engineering Services group within the IT department to obtain results from quantum chromodynamics code, which is an HPC workload used on clusters, and thus good fit for a machine with a high core count. The details of the evaluation will be published in an upcoming CERN openlab report.