Intel Introduces New Enthusiast Broadwell-E Processors, Including 10-core i7-6950X

As is customary now for a CPU refresh, Intel is releasing a new set of high-performance, enthusiast grade CPUs. Like previous generations, these new CPUs are based on the previous architecture, but are fine-tuned for performance. The new Core i7-6950X and its siblings are Broadwell-based CPUs, rather than the newer Skylake – but this doesn’t mean old performance. Broadwell was mostly skipped over on the desktop; instead, it made great inroads in the mobile and portable market. Skylake is not too different from Broadwell, with mostly supplementary tweaks to the architecture, as both share the same manufacture process.

The latest top-end chip from Intel was rumored to be of the 10-core variety, back in November; today now confirms that rumor, although some of the details of that chip and the others see minor adjustments to clock speeds and pricing. There are three CPUs other than the Extreme chip being announced at this time, which have fewer cores and the usual tweaks to the clock speed.

The last time we took a look at an Extreme CPU was all the way back in August 2014, where we saw the first consumer grade 8-core CPU from Intel. We will be testing out the top chip from the latest crop in the near-future; for now, though, let’s take a look at what to expect from this latest batch of CPUs.

High performance always looks better in black and gold, so be on the look out for the retail packaging if you feel like dropping the cash on some serious hardware. However, we’re not here for the packaging. The new 69xx and 68xx CPUs, much like the previous generation, make use of the specialist CPU socket, LGA2011-v3, so current generation X99 motherboards are compatible (although a firmware update will be required), since the same number of PCIe lanes are made available, as well as quad-channel memory.

The chart below outlines the current crop of Skylake CPUs with the latest enthusiast chips highlighted. The previous generation flagship i7-5960X has been thrown in for comparison, too, which certainly highlights something we were not expecting.

Check out the price tag for the i7-6950X and you’ll be astonished at the $1723 per thousand unit price – over $700 more than the previous flagship, and the most expensive consumer CPU Intel has ever released (and we thought the Skulltrail-targeted $1,500 QX9775 was expensive!). That is quite the jump over previous generations, and very much unexpected for what amounts to an extra two cores. This puts the i7-6950X firmly in Xeon territory, something that will likely need weighting if you decide to purchase. The Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 is a close comparison for the i7-6950X in terms of specs, but that costs just over $2000, and is built on an older architecture.

However, the i7-6950X and the other Extreme Edition CPUs can do something that Xeons can’t, and that’s overclock – providing you have sufficient cooling. If you are dropping $1700 on a CPU, though, you’ll probably be going for a full water loop as well, or at least a large AIO (All In One) liquid cooler.

What the chart above also shows is how the previous flagship Core i7-5960X is slightly out-performed by the new i7-6900K. An extra 200MHz might not seem a huge amount, but there are the minor tweaks to the architecture, plus the smaller manufacture process to help push clock speeds up further with overclocking. The minor boost in performance is also marked by the slight increase in price, too. This is likely Intel’s way of saying the old 5960X is not obsolete just yet.

If pure core counts are not your thing, then a good contender for a high-end system might come in the form of the Core i5-6850K. It has the fastest core speed out of all the new CPUs (the more cores a CPU has, the more heat there is and the slower the clock speed has to be to compensate), but also packs in the full 40x PCIe lanes for either 4x GPUs, a large bank of PCIe SSDs, or even the inclusion of Thunderbolt 3.0.

We have the i7-6950X on its way to our lab to test out, to give it the once-over with our broad range of benchmarks. The Broadwell-E range is mostly a minor update over the previous generation, resulting mostly in clock speed increases over the previous generation, with an extra CPU at the top for a 10-core monster. Most of the material we’ve been given is for the 10-core behemoth flexing it’s extra cores and high clock speeds. But this all comes back to same issue CPUs have had for the last decade: more cores means more simultaneous tasks, and games ain’t one of them. Where these multi-core giants will shine is in video encoding, audio processing, and complex math.