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Who's looking to waste some money! Broadwell-E announced

Skunk
Level 8
...and the pricing for the retail box of the i7-6950X is $1749-1799. (source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10337/the-intel-broadwell-e-review-core-i7-6950x-6900k-6850k-and-6800k...)


sorry about the size...this forum sucks and doesn't take width and height bbcode commands.

With Nvidia now recommending 2-way solutions at most, there really isn't any point to Broadwell-E unless you are a professional video editor or a nutty benchmark person with money to blow (database processing anyone?). Pretty much zero benefit to gaming.
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Nate152
Moderator
Hi skunk

The size of the picture is fine I'm more concerned with the price, I was expecting the typical grand for the top cpu. 2 more cores and 5MB more cache for 750 dollars more does seem a bit out of hand.

The 6950x is clocked the lowest too, is how it usually goes with more cores. Then you have the 6900k which looks identical to the 5960x with a 200MHz increase and around the same price. So I guess if you want those 2 cores and 5 MB of cache intel says fork it over. 😄

Skunk
Level 8
Hey Nate,

Back when I heard the rumors that the 6950X would be a bit more (maybe around $1500), it made sense to me because in Haswell, to get to 10-cores on the ring bus architecture they has, it would have required a shift to implement the 2 extra cores:



That architecture has 50% extra silicon, so it reasonably seemed that would amount to an aditional 50% is pricing.

However, they expanded the ring bus to include all 10 cores in a single loop:



Essentially, they are flowing Xeon pricing (and if you read the article it is actually a bit above Xeon pricing) to high-end consumer products which is highly profitable for Intel. The 6950X looks like it only overclocks to 4.1GHz for an average chip and 4.3GHz for an excellent chip. The minimal IPC improvements of Broadwell mean that if you have a 5960X chip clocked 4.8-5.0GHz, you'll have nearly equivalent total performance.

Really, if you are just gaming, go for the i7-6700K with higher performance/thread. Big Pascal, and perhaps Vega, will hopefully be out soon enough and will give enough GPU power to handle any single monitor with a single GPU an multi-monitor setup with dual GPUs.

SemiAccurate's Charlie Demerjian eviscerates Intel on Broadwell-E:

SemiAccurate: Intel's Broadwell-E Should Not Have Been Released

Charlie Demerjian wrote:
So in the end, other than marketing doublespeak, what does Intel’s new Broadwell-E family bring to the table? <3% clock gains mainly, the rest is either spin so powerful that it will be studied by physicists for years to come or flat-out nonsense. The 10-core version is utterly pointless, the 8-core is a regression from the non-crippled 6-core, and all are less suited to their main tasks than the Skylake based 6700K. If you have any Sandy Bridge based -E part or newer, there is absolutely no reason for you to upgrade. While there is an off chance that a minor feature or two is lurking under the marketing spin, Intel’s refusal to promote their own leadership features leaves us unable to recommend these new CPUs for any reason.S|A

Skunk
Level 8
And now Jarred Walton at PCGamer (and former writer at Anandtech) is not recommending Broadwell-E for anything but the niche case of gaming AND professional multi-threaded applications, like video editing on a daily basis, in one computer

PCGamer: The Broadwell-E Review

Jarred Walton wrote:
So they're definitely 'enthusiast' grade parts, but they're still not really going to benefit gaming enthusiasts. Why? Because core counts beyond four are largely unused by games (even DX12 titles), and the Skylake architecture has some improvements that keep it in the lead for most gaming workloads.


Here are his benchmarks with the processors overclocked (so you can't dispute that the HEDT parts can be overclocked more than non-HEDT):