Xeon E6540 's Advantages
Higher specification of memory (1333 vs 4)
Larger L3 cache size (18MB vs 8MB)
Intel Xeon E 2124 's Advantages
Released 8 years and 2 months late
Newer PCIe version (3 vs 2)
Higher base frequency (3.4GHz vs 2GHz)
More modern manufacturing process (14nm vs 45nm)
Lower TDP (72W vs 105W)