Intel Announcens New Core i7 Processor Extreme Edition Processors

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Designed for the extreme performance needs of enthusiasts, the Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition delivers with up to 10 cores and 20 threads, 40 PCIe* lanes, and a new Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 to tame the most demanding workloads. When game and content creators need incredible performance, they turn to Extreme Edition. Gamers today do more than just gameplay; they’re playing in 4K, they live-stream, record, edit and upload their highlights online, and communicate in real time with their eSports team or competitors. We call this mega-tasking, when simultaneous, compute-intensive, multithreaded workloads are needed. The Intel Core i7 processor Extreme Edition has up to 35 percent better 3D rendering performance for vivid 4K gameplay while accomplishing other compute-intensive tasks in the background. A new era in virtual reality has also begun and achieving the premium VR experiences delivered by the leading head- mounted displays on the market requires powerful PCs for both consuming and creating VR content.

Content creators also mega-task: They are editing, creating visual effects and composing music simultaneously. Creators also want to see the end result as they’re in the process of creating it, so with the ability to support multiple 4K displays along with the threads and performance to handle all of the simultaneous applications, Intel Core i7 processor Extreme Edition helps people spend more of their time creating and less time waiting. Intel Core i7 processor Extreme Edition opens up new levels of performance and capability enthusiasts never thought possible. Forty PCIe lanes connected directly into the CPU allow for system expansion with fast SSDs, up to four discrete GFX cards and ultra-fast Thunderbolt™ 3.0 technology. Massive Intel® Smart Cache of up to 25MB and quad-channel memory improves responsiveness and decreases startup time when working with large files and applications. The new Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 steers applications to the highest-performing core, improving single-threaded performance by up to 15 percent. The Intel® Core™ i7-69xx/68xx processor family is also unlocked, an important feature for enthusiasts who want the extra headroom and tools to push their system to the limit.
 
I'm still happy with my 3930k, but if I were shopping today, it looks to me like the 6850k would be the one to get, unless you do a lot of some less common workload (like rendering/encoding) where high core count is hugely beneficial.

The 6850k appears to be the sweet spot, with the highest clocks, 6 cores and all 40pcie lanes.
 
Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 seems like it could be a really cool feature. The Intel factory flags the CPU cores in order of ability to OC highest. And a special driver is added to Windows that overrides processor affinity. When a single threaded load occurs, it is placed upon the best core 100% of the time. Well that's my understanding of it; I read that early in the morning so...

That sounded really cool to me. Hoping that will allow the 6 core HEDT processors to match the 6700K in those odd titles where the 6700K suddenly takes off like a rabbit. Most of the time they are pretty close though.
 
Kinda lackluster, although that's what everyone was expecting so I guess not many will be disappointed. This certainly doesn't make me feel bad I went with a 6700K.
 
Kinda lackluster, although that's what everyone was expecting so I guess not many will be disappointed. This certainly doesn't make me feel bad I went with a 6700K.

I wouldn't feel bad if I had gone with a 6700k either. To me the excessive core counts are just silly for most users. The real benefit of these -E parts are the PCIe lanes, which is why - to me - the 28 lane gimped parts make no sense at all.

I want MORE lanes. More than 40!

My ideal system would have enough lanes to support 8 slots on an EATX / SSI CEB board ALL electrically 16x, to give me the maximum amount of expansion flexibility.

(I say this knowing full well I'd never use them all, so some sort of dynamic switching of lanes between slots would be just as good.)
 
The real benefit of these -E parts are the PCIe lanes, which is why - to me - the 28 lane gimped parts make no sense at all.
I want MORE lanes. More than 40!

Skylake-E on LGA 3647 will have 48 PCI Lanes, some progress, but yes I agree with your thinking.
 
Ill be buying a 6800K for my ITX rig and throwing the 5930K into a full ATX Desktop.
 
I wouldn't feel bad if I had gone with a 6700k either. To me the excessive core counts are just silly for most users. The real benefit of these -E parts are the PCIe lanes, which is why - to me - the 28 lane gimped parts make no sense at all.

I want MORE lanes. More than 40!

My ideal system would have enough lanes to support 8 slots on an EATX / SSI CEB board ALL electrically 16x, to give me the maximum amount of expansion flexibility.

(I say this knowing full well I'd never use them all, so some sort of dynamic switching of lanes between slots would be just as good.)

Don't forget the huge benefit that the Quad Channel RAM setup has over the Dual Channel setup.

Looking at numbers for both, it takes Dual Channel DDR4-4000 to match Quad Channel DDR3-1600.
 
The 6900k might finally be a worthwhile replacement for the X58-based i7-980 system I game on. I've been waiting YEARS.

Looking forward to quad channel DDR4 and PCI-E SSD's.
 
Don't forget the huge benefit that the Quad Channel RAM setup has over the Dual Channel setup.

Looking at numbers for both, it takes Dual Channel DDR4-4000 to match Quad Channel DDR3-1600.

Along with the fact that the 3930k is still plenty fast, DDR4 is actually one of the things keeping me from upgrading right now.

I have had no shortage of RAM bandwidth with my quad DDR3-1600, and I use a lot of RAM. Replacing my 64GB with DDR4 just adds more cost right now. I almost wish they had gone with some sort of dual memory controller to allow people to choose and upgrade over time.
 
That 9550X sounds pretty on paper and I am sure in the right environment it will pay for itself in time saved on compile times or renders or something... The wife would kill me figuratively or literally I am not quite sure of, but it would not end well for me.
 
I should have just bought a sky lake on release last year. I've now had my ivy bridge for 4 hours and I used to upgrade every 2 years...because it was worth it.
 
impressed with the new silicon, unimpressed with the prices. I'll hold out onto this Z97 for a little while longer.
 
X99 ? Still?
Why are you surprised? Let me give you a quick history lesson: X58 and X79 both covered two processor generations with little more than a BIOS update and some overclocking improvements to motherboards designed specifically for the refreshed CPUs. X58 covered Nahalem and Gulftown. X79 covered Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E. X99 now covers both Haswell-E and Broadwell-E.
 
Why are you surprised? Let me give you a quick history lesson: X58 and X79 both covered two processor generations with little more than a BIOS update and some overclocking improvements to motherboards designed specifically for the refreshed CPUs. X58 covered Nahalem and Gulftown. X79 covered Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E. X99 now covers both Haswell-E and Broadwell-E.

In your opinion, is there any legitimate disruptive technology which makes an argument to wait for the X99 successor? Putting serious weight into X99/6900K replacing my x58/980 still happy as a kitten for high-end gaming today.
 
If its purely for gaming I doubt you would get much more with the X99 successor. DMI 3.0, USB advances and integration, additional PCIe lanes that are used by your DMI and what ever upgrades to networking support.
 
In your opinion, is there any legitimate disruptive technology which makes an argument to wait for the X99 successor? Putting serious weight into X99/6900K replacing my x58/980 still happy as a kitten for high-end gaming today.

The X99 successor is likely going to be the Lewisberg chipset, detailed here:

Intel-Xeon-E7-E5-Skylake-EX-_Purely-Platform_Brickland-EX-Comparison.jpg
 
When will we see some wonderful [H] reviews?

Pretty much, never? [H] CPU reviews every year are more and more bores and slowly dying. Kyle isn't making review anymore, just a yearly review at most, no follow-ups, no updates, no dedicated games CPU performance reviews and the little you can find about games will be with old games at 640x480 low settings so nothing real world.. would be absolutely amazing if they could make CPU reviews as GPU reviews or add CPU testing to the GPU reviews as techspot do, so overall we don't have to rely on other sources and sites for CPU comparisons which its kinda sad.
 
Pretty much, never? [H] CPU reviews every year are more and more bores and slowly dying. Kyle isn't making review anymore, just a yearly review at most, no follow-ups, no updates, no dedicated games CPU performance reviews and the little you can find about games will be with old games at 640x480 low settings so nothing real world.. would be absolutely amazing if they could make CPU reviews as GPU reviews or add CPU testing to the GPU reviews as techspot do, so overall we don't have to rely on other sources and sites for CPU comparisons which its kinda sad.

Have you taken a serious look at what those reviews show for gaming though? The reason they use low resolutions is so the videocard isn't the bottleneck. Other than that, CPU performance gains across the top end CPUs have been so minimal over the past few years there is no point. Take a look at the i7-6950x review from Intel Core I7 6950X Extreme Edition Broadwell-E CPU Review and check out the gaming benchmarks on page 7. No, not the 3dmark benchmarks on page 7, that isn't a game. I'm talking about Metro last light and Batman arkham origins. That's what, 10% better than an i7-6700k? For $1600 vs $330 or so? Come on. Realistically speaking, no one is going to care about that. Now when it comes to actual CPU intensive tasks sure, but the market has been so stagnant for the past 5 years(especially with nothing from AMD to counter anything Intel has been doing), there's simply no point in doing CPU gaming benchmarks.

edit: The TLDR version: No one buying a $1600+ CPU gives a crap about the gaming benchmarks unless something else is running. There is so little performance difference between products, most people don't care. CPU gaming benchmarks are done that way for a reason.
 
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Kyle has said in the past he has no interest in doing CPU reviews outside of major releases. It's rather redundant to do a thorough review on something that is only a marginal speed bump. They tested Haswell-E, I'd be surprised if they do broadwell-E.
 
Have you taken a serious look at what those reviews show for gaming though? The reason they use low resolutions is so the videocard isn't the bottleneck. Other than that, CPU performance gains across the top end CPUs have been so minimal over the past few years there is no point. Take a look at the i7-6950x review from Intel Core I7 6950X Extreme Edition Broadwell-E CPU Review and check out the gaming benchmarks on page 7. No, not the 3dmark benchmarks on page 7, that isn't a game. I'm talking about Metro last light and Batman arkham origins. That's what, 10% better than an i7-6700k? For $1600 vs $330 or so? Come on. Realistically speaking, no one is going to care about that. Now when it comes to actual CPU intensive tasks sure, but the market has been so stagnant for the past 5 years(especially with nothing from AMD to counter anything Intel has been doing), there's simply no point in doing CPU gaming benchmarks.

edit: The TLDR version: No one buying a $1600+ CPU gives a crap about the gaming benchmarks unless something else is running. There is so little performance difference between products, most people don't care. CPU gaming benchmarks are done that way for a reason.

This is off-topic but, I don't care about a 1600$ CPU being tested for games, I do care for periodic modern games CPU test, I want [H] as a reliable source for CPU benchmarks for modern games at real world usages, so again instead of have to outsource other sites in a discussion, there's a big amount of games out there that at even at 2560x1440 show a big difference across different CPUs, so what's the problem with test some games every couple of months at 1920x1080? that's good enough to real world performance measurement and a good indicator of how CPUs/technology advance and/or make better use of more threads, we need this kind of test actually, because games have evolved A LOT to what used to be 2 or 3 years ago, we have games that actually show huge scaling over 4 real cores, we have games where the extra 4 threads of an i7 make a huge difference, so how and where should we go to see what's the real world performance when buying a new CPU or when we have a little upgrade itch around the head.. other sites? that's lame.. you can't advice over CPU upgrades in this forum without source from other sites, you know, in their last Gaming Benchmarks - Intel Skylake Core i7-6700K IPC & Overclocking Review review, in their copy and paste format they say:

As always, these benchmarks in no way represent real-world gameplay. These are all run at very low resolutions to try our best to remove the video card as a bottleneck. I will not hesitate to say that anyone spouting these types of framerate measurements as a true gameplay measuring tool in today’s climate is not servicing your needs or telling you the real truth.

The gaming tests below have been put together to focus on the processor power exhibited by each system. All the tests below consist of custom time demos built with stressing the CPU in mind. So much specialized coding comes into the programming now days we suggest that looking at gaming performance by using real-world gameplay is the only sure way to know what you are going to get with a specific game. Our CPUs & Real-World Gameplay Scaling would be a great place to start.

marvelous right?. they point to a 2009 "Real-world gameplay scaling" seriously? so games are still developed as they was in 2009? how we extrapolate that review to modern gaming? its impossible.. I Think im not the only want wishing real-world CPU game testing directly from [H]OCP. I don't care about synths, they can focus purely on gaming and everyone will be happy with 4 or 5 heavy CPU games and see how they perform, it's that so hard to achieve? you may find this kind of test across the web in dozens of sites and videos, however they always have contradictory results, which one lie? which one it's reliable? nobody knows, so at the end if a friend ask you for help you could be giving a good or bad advice depending on which review you based your advice, instead of a truly reliable source as [H]..
 
And on the other hand it's like AnandTech doesn't do GPU reviews any more. lol.
 
And on the other hand it's like AnandTech doesn't do GPU reviews any more. lol.

yeah sadly since Anand left anandtech to work at Apple (lol they should change their name) and the site was acquired by Purch group things have changed a lot..
 
yeah sadly since Anand left anandtech to work at Apple (lol they should change their name) and the site was acquired by Purch group things have changed a lot..

Yes, it's gone completely downhill. Sad because I used to really enjoy their articles. But for making purchasing decisions they're pretty worthless because their reviews are always late.
 
In your opinion, is there any legitimate disruptive technology which makes an argument to wait for the X99 successor? Putting serious weight into X99/6900K replacing my x58/980 still happy as a kitten for high-end gaming today.

m.2/u.2 raid. SLI and two 950 pros in raid utilizes all 40 lanes.
 
This is off-topic but, I don't care about a 1600$ CPU being tested for games, I do care for periodic modern games CPU test, I want [H] as a reliable source for CPU benchmarks for modern games at real world usages, so again instead of have to outsource other sites in a discussion, there's a big amount of games out there that at even at 2560x1440 show a big difference across different CPUs, so what's the problem with test some games every couple of months at 1920x1080? that's good enough to real world performance measurement and a good indicator of how CPUs/technology advance and/or make better use of more threads, we need this kind of test actually, because games have evolved A LOT to what used to be 2 or 3 years ago, we have games that actually show huge scaling over 4 real cores, we have games where the extra 4 threads of an i7 make a huge difference, so how and where should we go to see what's the real world performance when buying a new CPU or when we have a little upgrade itch around the head.. other sites? that's lame.. you can't advice over CPU upgrades in this forum without source from other sites, you know, in their last Gaming Benchmarks - Intel Skylake Core i7-6700K IPC & Overclocking Review review, in their copy and paste format they say:



marvelous right?. they point to a 2009 "Real-world gameplay scaling" seriously? so games are still developed as they was in 2009? how we extrapolate that review to modern gaming? its impossible.. I Think im not the only want wishing real-world CPU game testing directly from [H]OCP. I don't care about synths, they can focus purely on gaming and everyone will be happy with 4 or 5 heavy CPU games and see how they perform, it's that so hard to achieve? you may find this kind of test across the web in dozens of sites and videos, however they always have contradictory results, which one lie? which one it's reliable? nobody knows, so at the end if a friend ask you for help you could be giving a good or bad advice depending on which review you based your advice, instead of a truly reliable source as [H]..
If a friend of mine was looking for advice about a CPU and asked about a $1600 10 core CPU for gaming, I'd tell them it's their money to waste.\\
No, there is not a big amount of games that show a massive difference at higher resolutions. At most you're looking at board limitations(PCI), at worst it's just showing a video card bottleneck. If you want to benchmark a CPU, you eliminate the videocard as it isn't relevant. What's amazing is that this is a thread about Broadwell-E and you're wanting to bring up Skylake? Why? To further re-inforce my point about 10% gains in gaming for 5x the cost? Obviously the guys at hardocp don't feel it's worth their time to bother.

Look at the overclockers.com review they linked. The 6950x performed the same or WORSE than the 6700 in gaming.
Look at the cowcotland review they posted the 6950x performed the same or worse than the 6700 in gaming.
The PCPer review they linked didn't even waste their time with game benchmarks.

You realize why this is the case, right? Yes, it's got 10 cores. But they're slower cores. Unless you want them to do benchmarks for how long it takes the computer to complete its turns in Civ(and even that might not necessarily be setup properly to take advantage of that many available threads), it's pointless.

Yeah you can game with the 6950x, but that's not the primary reason anyone is buying it unless they have money to burn(and that's up to them). Why is this the case? Because the CPU market has truly been this stagnant since Sandy Bridge(in terms of performance. Efficiency and core count are other matters, but neither does much good for gaming).
 
If a friend of mine was looking for advice about a CPU and asked about a $1600 10 core CPU for gaming, I'd tell them it's their money to waste.\\
No, there is not a big amount of games that show a massive difference at higher resolutions. At most you're looking at board limitations(PCI), at worst it's just showing a video card bottleneck. If you want to benchmark a CPU, you eliminate the videocard as it isn't relevant. What's amazing is that this is a thread about Broadwell-E and you're wanting to bring up Skylake? Why? To further re-inforce my point about 10% gains in gaming for 5x the cost? Obviously the guys at hardocp don't feel it's worth their time to bother.

Look at the overclockers.com review they linked. The 6950x performed the same or WORSE than the 6700 in gaming.
Look at the cowcotland review they posted the 6950x performed the same or worse than the 6700 in gaming.
The PCPer review they linked didn't even waste their time with game benchmarks.

You realize why this is the case, right? Yes, it's got 10 cores. But they're slower cores. Unless you want them to do benchmarks for how long it takes the computer to complete its turns in Civ(and even that might not necessarily be setup properly to take advantage of that many available threads), it's pointless.

Yeah you can game with the 6950x, but that's not the primary reason anyone is buying it unless they have money to burn(and that's up to them). Why is this the case? Because the CPU market has truly been this stagnant since Sandy Bridge(in terms of performance. Efficiency and core count are other matters, but neither does much good for gaming).

It's the fact that the i7-6950X can game well AND do a whole whack of other tasks at the same time that makes it worthwhile. The cores on the i7-6950X may be slightly slower, but not by much and it has many more of them. One can encode something, play a game and do another task all at once, all without compromising perfomance.
 
It's the fact that the i7-6950X can game well AND do a whole whack of other tasks at the same time that makes it worthwhile. The cores on the i7-6950X may be slightly slower, but not by much and it has many more of them. One can encode something, play a game and do another task all at once, all without compromising perfomance.
Yeah, already stated as much in post #24.
 
I was really hoping my current setup will last me until skylake--e or skylake-x whatever they call it, however my second pcie slot is broken on my motherboard and I don't want to wait another year with no sli just to wait for skylake-e. However the broadwell-e is so underwhelming that I am wondering if I should just replace my motherboard with a used one or just go for broadwell-e or haswell-e for cheap.
 
What's do you have with your current setup?

In my sig. 2600k @ 4.8 ghz. 2 hybrid evga 980 ti in sli before but now only one because of the motherboard. I'm doing more video encoding stuff so I want 6 or more cores for my next cpu. Issue is broadwell-e overclock is so bad it negates the benefit it has over haswell-e
 
It's a point of diminishing returns and with the Canadian pricing on the 6950X it's way past diminishing returns considering that for a long time (ever since 2008) flagship processors at the most have been ~999 USD. The QX9770 is an exception to that. What you mentioned can also be done even with current 6 core processors or 8 core processors. Even 10/12 core Xeons are cheaper than what the 6950X is asking for in MSRP (Canadian markups are absurd). Also the overclocking potential on the Broadwell-E processors without watercooling is just dysmal. We will soon get to the level of 150W TDP just like the QX9770 was without anything to really write about with overclocking and Broadwell-E offers minimal IPC gains (even smaller than SB-E to IVB-E was).

1) All Intel has done here is offer a product above the flagship for a higher price to those who want it. Most won't buy it, but at least those who want a higher caliber of CPU now have the option rather than being forced to buy an inferior neutered product. An Extreme product should be truly Extreme, and most definitely NOT a neutered product. The i7-6950X adds some of the mystique and exclusiveness to the top SKU that it badly needed.

2) Current 6-core and 8-core processors can't match the 10-core in multi-tasking ability. The 10-core can do much more than the 6 and 8-cores can before hitting the performance wall.

3) The 10/12-core Xeons can't game worth a crap while performing multi-threaded tasks. The 10-core E5-2640 V4 has a maximum all core turbo of 2.6GHz at $939. The E5-2650 V4 has a maximum all core turbo of 2.5 GHz at $1166. If you apply a multi-threaded task to these chips and then try and game, you are really going to have a bad experience due to the VERY low clock speed. Even lightly threaded tasks kick the clock speed down very hard on these chips. The i7-6950X will run ALL tasks at 4.2-4.3GHz when overclocked to that speed and destroy the Xeons one-on-one. This alone makes it worth its price.

4) Who really cares about TDP? We as overclockers violate that number on a regular basis using better cooling to give us the ability to get better performance.

5) The only drawback of the i7-6950X is the lack of dual CPU and ECC support. For the price being asked, those features should be included.

The SKU stack and prices are largely unchanged from Haswell-E, except for the new 10-core at the top of it. It seems most of the griping and moaning about the price of the i7-6950X comes from the group of people who paid $999 to buy the old Extreme Edition and we're proud to have "the best chip." That is no longer the case, as that price no longer buys you "the best chip". All the griping seems more the result of bruised egos that are the result of their chip now being second best. It's like a $100,000 BMW X5 M owner complaining that BMW just released a new $160,000 "Super X5 M" with 25% more horsepower...most of their angst would stem from the fact that their vehicle, that they paid a very pretty penny for, is now second best.

Folks should accept the fact that their 6 or 8-core largely meets their needs and should be happy with that fact. I'm very happy with the i7-6950X as it better meets my needs. While Broadwell-E may not be all that we hoped for clock-wise, at least the products being offered are better meeting the needs of all levels of enthusiasts and we should all be happy for that fact.;)
 
Should have just released the existing batches of 1681/1686/1691 v3s if you ask me and moved on to Skylake-X.

Would be cheaper on RnD side for sure. Plus the folks of lutjens kind would definitely be happier with even 1681v3 over 6950X.
 
Should have just released the existing batches of 1681/1686/1691 v3s if you ask me and moved on to Skylake-X.

Would be cheaper on RnD side for sure. Plus the folks of lutjens kind would definitely be happier with even 1681v3 over 6950X.

The E5-1691 V3 would definitely have worked for me and I'd have happily paid dearly for it too...;)
 
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