Today folks at VideoCardz brought us yet another leak. Today’s leak features 5 press slides from Intel’s upcoming Extreme Edition Broadwell-E HEDT lineup. But what does Broadwell-E actually bring to the table this year? Let’s find out.
Broadwell-E brings first 10 core / 20 thread CPU to consumer market
It has been almost 2 years since Intel launched their last Extreme Edition CPU lineup which featured Haswell-E architecture. This year, presumably at Computex 2016 in few days, Intel is going to introduce their new Extreme Edition CPU lineup featuring Broadwell-E. Compared to Haswell-E lineup there are not many changes. These new CPUs will feature from six to to ten cores, they will go into the the same LGA 2011-3 socket, will support quad channel 2400MHz DDR4 memory and will utillize the same X99 chipset which means that most of current X99 motherboards should be compatible with those new CPUs and only a BIOS update will be required. New CPUs are built on Intel’s 14nm process node found in Intel’s current Broadwell and Skylake based CPUs, will feature up to 25MB cache and will have 140W TDP across the whole lineup. Broadwell-E brings few new features one of which is Turbo Boost Max 3.0 and Intel claims that this feature can bring more than 15% more single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. Whether this is true or not we will have to wait for proper benchmarks. Other new three features will excite overclocking enthusiasts because Intel is bringing new Per Core Overclocking, AVX Ratio Offset and VccU Voltage Control.
Intel claims that the new 10 core 6950X should bring up to 35% more multi-threaded performance compared to current eight core 5960X which seems reasonable considering it has two additional cores and four additional threads. Sadly we don’t have almost any performance numbers other than those Intel included in these leaked press slides which should be taken with a grain of salt considering even Intel states that the benchmarks may have been optimised to show better performance.
10 cores is nice but you will have to pay for it
Now to the negative side of the new Broadwell-E lineup which is the pricing. It has been a tradition for Intel to price their Extreme Edition flagships at $999, however this is no longer the case. Unfortunately Intel has highered the prices compared to current lineup. For 10 core 6950X you will have to pay shocking $1723. 6900k eight core variant also got more expensive compared to current 5960X priced at $999 wheras 6900k will be priced at $1089. Six core variants increased in prices as well, for 6850k it is $617 compared to 5930k priced at $583 and for 6800k priced at $434 compared to 5820k priced at $389.
These prices will disappoint enthusiasts hoping to get their hands on CPUs with more cores at reasonable prices. We can only hope the actual real world increase of the new architecture will be enough to justify those prices.
In the slides we can also see that the NDA lifts at 11:00PM May 30th, 2016 so we should see full Broadwell-E reveal very soon followed by reviews and benchmarks shortly after that.