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Always since Intel debuted the "E" family of hardware with Sandy Bridge-E in 2022, these processors accept formed the backbone of Intel's top-tier enthusiast offerings. While the number of cores at the tiptop of Intel's regular consumer products has stayed steady since 2009'south Nehalem — four cores with Hyper-Threading — the company has steadily increased the number of CPU cores it offered in the "Eastward" family, from vi with Sandy and Ivy Bridge, upward to eight with Haswell-Eastward.

The problem with Haswell-East, however, was that its core counts came at the price of lower overall speeds compared to the Core i7-4970K. This was especially truthful with the 8-cadre version of the chip, which clocked in at 3GHz base of operations, 3.5GHz Turbo. In these cases, a Core i7-5960X wasn't always faster than the much cheaper 4970K, despite having more cores.

Broadwell-E

The Broadwell-E die. Ten cores, 25MB of shared L3 cache.

Intel has made a diverseness of changes to Broadwell-E that it hopes will convalesce some of these discrepencies and create a more varied product family. Permit'south kicking off at the high level and piece of work our mode down.

Broadwell-E-1

The top-stop Broadwell-Due east is a 10-cadre CPU with 25MB of L3 cache (2.5MB per core). Intel holds this ratio abiding in its East-class processors — eight-core chips have 20MB of cache, while six-core fries accept 15MB. This new CPU is a drop-in replacement on the X99 chipset, so if you already have ane of these boards for Haswell-E, Broadwell-E should be a drop-in replacement with the appropriate BIOS flash. So let's look at the chips themselves:

BDW-EPricing

The 6950X is Intel's 10-core CPU, merely the price tag on this fleck is going to raise some serious eyebrows. At $1723, Intel is charging i.58x more for a 10-core CPU than an eight-core chip. The problem is, you're just adding 2 more cores and four more than threads. Paying sixty% more cash for 33% more cores isn't all that appealing, fifty-fifty if it'south technically impressive that Intel managed to add two cores while keeping clock rates the same and without increasing CPU TDP.

The Core i7-6900K carries a $1089 price tag and the same core count while increasing clock speeds slightly (up roughly 5%). The lower-end SKUs are withal six-core parts and only see 100MHz increases. This isn't exactly the enhancements that dreams are made of, though we want to annotation that the $412 price on the 6800K is actually quite good compared to the 6700K's $327, provided you lot know you'll utilise the boosted cores.

In lieu of raw performance improvements, Intel is counting on some significant updates to its overclocking feature set to win over enthusiast hearts and minds.

Overclocking

Per-core overclocking is a nice bear upon, since it offers enthusiasts the option to exam each core individually, decide which frequencies work best for which CPU cores, and and then set them accordingly, with individual voltage curves. The i potentially substantial caveat to this is that how a cadre behaves lonely and how it behaves when information technology'south loaded alongside other cores in the system could potentially be quite different. All the same, per-core frequency targets could give overclockers some intriguing tuning capabilities. Permit's say, for example, that yous decide four of your 10 CPU cores are capable of hitting 4GHz, six tin can accomplish 3.7GHz, eight are capable of iii.6GHz, and all 10 tin run at iii.5GHz. Congratulations — assuming y'all've got the cooling to handle it, your x-core chip is at present running 14-16% over stock on a voltage and frequency bend you can piece of work with and define yourself.

It's not clear exactly what VccU stands for, but the AVX ratio kickoff is related to a feature Intel has offered on its Xeon processors for several years. If y'all've paid attention to Intel's long-term FLOPS scaling, you're aware that Intel doubled the number of FLOPS information technology could perform per clock when it launched AVX, and then doubled that figure again with AVX2.

FLOPS-Comp

FLOPS per clock rating on Intel CPUs.

These continual doublings don't happen for free, however — the 256-bit AVX2 registers draw more power, which lowers the maximum frequency Intel can support. Starting with the Xeon E5v3 family, Intel began setting lower maximum frequencies for its CPUs when they were executing sustained AVX2 workloads. It's going to give enthusiasts the option to ready those offsets manually, defining different throttle points or possibly eliminating them altogether if you tin can handle the oestrus the CPU is kick out (note that Intel's thermal trip protections volition proceed to role ordinarily). Intel is besides challenge that its Turbo Max 3.0 feature can deliver up to a 15% comeback compared to the Cadre i7-5960X's method of regulating clock speed; nosotros'll have to confirm that in benchmark testing (our examination motherboards didn't fifty-fifty make it until Friday, which is why we don't have a review ready to curl for you fine folks).

Platform improvements

In that location are 2 more aspects to the launch that we want to encompass. Commencement, Broadwell-E does bump upwards formal support for faster DDR4, up to DDR4-2400 instead of DDR4-2133. In practice, DDR4-3200 is already available, and we doubtable many enthusiasts volition opt for this instead, merely if you care nearly sticking to Intel's spec, well, things are a bit faster.

Secondly, Intel is now working with motherboard vendors to build Thunderbolt 3 support into specific motherboards that are rated for the feature, every bit shown below:

TBolt3

Thunderbolt 3 has been aircraft on more systems than its predecessor thank you to the decision to bandy to the USB Blazon-C connector. If you've got a mixed workstation surroundings with both Apple and PC hardware, calculation Thunderbolt support to the PC side of the equation is a useful capability — and Thunderbolt iii is significantly faster than Thunderbolt two, with more flexibility and raw throughput.

Early thoughts

If Intel tin can deliver significant clock speed improvements through Turbo Boost Max 3.0, it may heave its overall CPU performance by a larger margin than the raw clock speed figures listed here. We bluntly hope this is the example, as the full general argument for ownership a Broadwell-E over Haswell-Due east isn't very stiff.

There are two points to be fabricated here: First, while at that place's admittedly no show that Intel is sitting on actress functioning information technology doesn't want to unlock, it is fair to note that Intel has faced absolutely no contest in the loftier-end space since information technology launched the Core i7 family viii years agone. Intel's modern production stack is priced past core count more than clock speed, and it hasn't stretched itself to push core counts higher in the consumer market. From 2003 – 2006, Intel moved from one core to four. Six-core chips didn't debut for another four years, and eight-core CPUs took four years after that. If Intel had been under genuine competitive force per unit area, information technology would've rolled those improvements more quickly than it did, and for a much lower price.

Merely — and this is critical — pushing higher CPU core counts into the market doesn't mean that software will magically materialize to take advantage of those cores. According to Steam's hardware survey, 47.12% of users are still on dual-core CPUs, while 45.86% have quad-core chips. The overwhelming majority of consumer software is nonetheless quad-threaded or less.

Now, it'southward possible that the appearance of DX12 will usher in an era where higher-end multi-cadre CPUs will prove themselves, AMD's Zen volition offer stronger competition for Intel, and loftier-terminate desktop users will rejoice to notice their CPU investments in gaming are finally paying off. That's a pretty big bound to brand from where we are to where nosotros'd need to be, however, and information technology normally takes the industry 3-4 years to brand a move that meaning, especially when it involves API updates and fundamental engine overhauls.

If you're a workstation user who wants a 10-core CPU at a higher clock for less money than an equivalent Xeon might price, and so the Cadre i7-6950X is exactly what y'all're looking for. Most gamers are still going to meliorate served by the Core i7-6700K, though those of you who blend workstation and gaming workloads might want to have a look at the Core i7-6800K — while yous merchandise off some clock speed, y'all yet go 50% more cores for 26% more toll. It's a internet gain if yous use workloads that can benefit. And if you lot're using older hardware, like a Westmere or Sandy Bridge-E organisation, then the option to footstep up to a ten-core rig may also exist extremely bonny. Ordinary gamers and users, we suspect, will exercise best with a 6700K or possibly something from the Kaby Lake refresh Intel is expected to launch this yr.