We anticipated it back in mid-April, although the source at that time was not entirely official. Yesterday, on the first day of the Computex Taipei 2016 convention, speculations came to an end: Intel presented the Core i7-6950X, its new flagship processor in the 14-nanometer Broadwell-E family, compatible with the LGA 2011-3 socket. It is the first Intel chip with ten cores aimed at "general" consumption, and as we had calculated, its price falls squarely into four-digit territory.
An announcement at Computex Taipei
Computex Taipei left behind its first day, and of course it was packed with news, but the most important hardware players will have until June 4 to show their products and reveal their strategies for the second half of the year. One of those players is Intel, which decided to present to the public one of its worst-kept secrets. From leaks on the official page to data filtered by its main partners, we have been receiving information about the Core i7-6950X for weeks. With the doors of Computex open, Intel lifted the embargo (a process more symbolic than anything else at this point) and released its "little big monster".
Specifications
It is easy to understand the enthusiasm surrounding the processor just by looking at its specifications. The Xeon family crossed the ten-core barrier almost two years ago, but this is the first time we see a chip with that number of cores aimed at desktop systems. The presence of Hyper-Threading technology automatically doubles the processing threads; however, we all agree that highly optimized software will be needed to fully squeeze such a level of resources. The rest of the numbers confirm what we already knew: 3 GHz base frequency, 3.5 GHz in Turbo mode, 25 MB of L3 cache, 40 dedicated PCI Express 3.0 lanes, and a TDP of 140 watts. The Core i7-6950X can use DDR4-2400 memory in quad-channel, which should guarantee enough bandwidth for almost any application.
A bet on the future
Now, we need to pause here. The Intel Core i7-6950X is (potentially) the most powerful processor that the Santa Clara giant has made for the desktop, but whoever decides to invest their money in it will be making a big "bet on the future", beyond the fact that Intel's high-end has increasingly wider architectural differences compared to its mass-market chips. The first benchmarks speak for themselves: No game can use 10 cores and 20 threads, period. It will be up to each developer to work on multi-core optimization, or play their cards in favor of better performance with current graphics cards. On the other hand, in environments with high multi-threading support (4K encoding, compression, rendering, etc.), or that need to load several virtual machines at once, the 6950X and its smaller brothers are ideal. As for the price, the image already reveals it, but let's repeat it just in case: $1,723. We weren't that far from the 1,500 after all...
