Intel’s Broadwell-E Flagship Core i7-6950X Processor Confirmed – 10 Core Madness For X99 Enthusiast

David Bisset · 31 May 2016 at 20:07

ihatelag said:
If they are going Broadwell-E for the 6950X does that mean we will get a Skylake equivalent in the future?

Also noted that it only supports up to DD4-2400! lol

The CPUs? Remember Intel is always very low on these - Skylake states support for up to DDR4-2133 though mobos support faster and of course everyone is using faster.

Purgatory · 31 May 2016 at 20:25

After reading the reviews of BW-E it's basically a worse overclocking version of HW-E and the temps shoot sky high the minute you get near 1.35v. Will avoid them for now and in the future will grab a 10 core when the prices come right down as that is basically my next upgrade or a cheap 8 core Haswell-E and not the Broadwell version unless it is going really cheap. Well only good thing that came out of this is the ability to go 10 core on the platform so far in the future.

Really disappointing with BW-E and GTX 1080, they said 2016 was going to be a great year for PC technology, so far it's a fail and the prices are terrible.

Simon Belmont · 31 May 2016 at 20:57

With the gains and price I'll pass.

Silent_Scone · 31 May 2016 at 23:04

Purgatory said:
After reading the reviews of BW-E it's basically a worse overclocking version of HW-E and the temps shoot sky high the minute you get near 1.35v. Will avoid them for now and in the future will grab a 10 core when the prices come right down as that is basically my next upgrade or a cheap 8 core Haswell-E and not the Broadwell version unless it is going really cheap. Well only good thing that came out of this is the ability to go 10 core on the platform so far in the future.

Really disappointing with BW-E and GTX 1080, they said 2016 was going to be a great year for PC technology, so far it's a fail and the prices are terrible.

More whine, sir?

Cromulent · 1 Jun 2016 at 05:35

I'm going to stick to my decision to wait until Skylake-E I think. I'll see if prices for the 10 core come down a little bit for that but if not I'll just get the 8c/16t CPU in Skylake-E.

At least Skylake-E will come with a new motherboard chipset which is what I am really looking forward to. I think I need some of the new motherboard tech like USB 3.1 and an M.2 slot for OS based SSD. My current motherboard is X79 and is starting to look a bit old now so I want a new one with all the latest features. Having PCI-Express 3.0 would help as well. So yeah Skylake-E it is then.

danielanthony · 1 Jun 2016 at 10:21

Got the 6950X and new mobo to go with my 128Gb RAM.

Will be using it as a gaming rig AND a virtualisation workstation so need the cores and the ram to run multiple VM's (OpenStack/TryStack, virtual storage, KVM nested compute).

Nasher · 1 Jun 2016 at 10:29

Intel are slowly pricing themselves out of the market. Most people just aren't going to bother for those prices. Especially not for such small gains (or none at all in gaming).

If Zen is sensibly priced and competitive, they will steal the gaming market share overnight. Many people are holding off upgrading at the moment and have been for years.

joeyjojo · 1 Jun 2016 at 14:48

Nasher said:
Intel are slowly pricing themselves out of the market. Most people just aren't going to bother for those prices. Especially not for such small gains (or none at all in gaming).

"Extreme" processors aren't for "most people" though. The "market" wants Atoms and i3s. These i7s are presumably for "prosumer"/business use - workstations on the cheap.

What's the alternative? The closest xeons I can find to the 6950X say (in terms of core count and speed) are the E5-2667 v4 and E5-2687W v4. Yes the Xeons can be used 2-way and the i7 has a higher turbo speed but they're otherwise pretty close:

http://ark.intel.com/compare/91750,92979,94456

Those CPUs retail at over £1400 ex VAT. The 6950X is a "bargain" at about £300 less.

FrankJH · 1 Jun 2016 at 15:06

jigger said:
Silly priced for a desktop. Becomes quickly unmanageable from a cooling point and can't overclock for toffee.

On the workstation side it's cheaper than a lot of Xeons options but it's not really a stand out CPU in the Xeon world. For a very similar price you can have a 28 thread 3.6Ghz chip with the options of adding a second CPU.

It's an oddball chip that offers very little/nothing in either world.

surely you would pay a lot more for a workstation dual mobo though, and potentially different psu and therefore case for the bigger mobo (?)?

(dont get me wrong, still worth it vfm wise, but not as straight a comparison)

jigger · 1 Jun 2016 at 21:03

FrankJH said:
surely you would pay a lot more for a workstation dual mobo though, and potentially different psu and therefore case for the bigger mobo (?)?

(dont get me wrong, still worth it vfm wise, but not as straight a comparison)

No not really. You would have no problem building a dual socket 20 core system for about the same price. Probably a lot less TBH.

joeyjojo · 1 Jun 2016 at 21:44

jigger said:
No not really. You would have no problem building a dual socket 20 core system for about the same price. Probably a lot less TBH.

Which "very similar price[d] ... 28 thread 3.6Ghz" CPU were you referring to?

jigger · 1 Jun 2016 at 23:28

I think it's the 2680 or 2690. Intel Ark will tell you

JABenedicic · 2 Jun 2016 at 00:01

jigger said:
I think it's the 2680 or 2690. Intel Ark will tell you

The E5-2660v4 is about £1200.
The E5-2680v4 is about £1500.

A SuperMicro DP 2011 board depending on features you want will set you back about £400.

Seems pretty much the same ball park totals as the 6950x and a decent X99 board (for a single CPU setup, its considerably more once you start talking dual CPU).

Even if I go down to some of the older v3 Xeon's for a 10c/20t at around 3Ghz you are still looking at over £1k.

It's horses for courses.

There seems to be a lot of salt in this thread and I'm not really sure why. What were people expecting? I think the BW-E line up was always going to appeal to a niche audience, the same as the Xeon's do (outside of business and servers) in the retail market.

People that want them will buy them and enjoy them, when the next big thing comes out they may well buy that as well and then this generation will float around the second hand market and many people might get a bargain in a number of months time.

I fail to understand the overall negativity.

jigger · 2 Jun 2016 at 00:23

If you drop down to older Xeons you could probably get a pair of chips, a dual socket board and 64 maybe 128GB of RAM for about the price of this chip.

JABenedicic · 2 Jun 2016 at 00:47

jigger said:
If you drop down to older Xeons you could probably get a pair of chips, a dual socket board and 64 maybe 128GB of RAM for about the price of this chip.

Ok, cheapest E5 on this site, would only give me 8 cores across 2 CPU's and is still going to cost me just under £600.

A SuperMicro X10D series dual socket board will cost me £400 minimum, likely closer to £500.

That leaves me with £300-400 to get ECC RAM, which is roughly doable, but performance may well be lacking unless I balance the channels and CPUs correctly (I'd have to look it up for the SM boards as I've not done it in non-Cisco servers in ages).

Ideally I want to fill all those slots up, 16GB Samsung ECC DDR is around £80-100 per stick, 32GB Samsung ECC DDR is around £200 per stick. If I fill the board up, I'm now way over budget of the 6950X.

But guess what, I've got a more complex system to manage and I've got less cores and performance.

I don't see what your point is?

nkuk · 2 Jun 2016 at 02:18

JABenedicic said:
Ok, cheapest E5 on this site, would only give me 8 cores across 2 CPU's and is still going to cost me just under £600.

A SuperMicro X10D series dual socket board will cost me £400 minimum, likely closer to £500.

That leaves me with £300-400 to get ECC RAM, which is roughly doable, but performance may well be lacking unless I balance the channels and CPUs correctly (I'd have to look it up for the SM boards as I've not done it in non-Cisco servers in ages).

Ideally I want to fill all those slots up, 16GB Samsung ECC DDR is around £80-100 per stick, 32GB Samsung ECC DDR is around £200 per stick. If I fill the board up, I'm now way over budget of the 6950X.

But guess what, I've got a more complex system to manage and I've got less cores and performance.

I don't see what your point is?

I just read this on the Anandtech review:

"For $1721, if a user wants to invest in the i7-6950X but does not want the overclocking, they can invest in either the 14-core E5-2680 v4 for $1745 giving 40% more cores at a lower power with a slight decrease in frequency, or get double the cores in a 2P system and using the E5-2640 v4 processor: a 10-core 2.4 GHz/3.4 GHz part, running at 90W, for $939. Two of these runs a $1878, which is slightly more but having double the cores available might be the more important thing here."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10337...900k-6850k-and-6800k-tested-up-to-10-cores/12

It seems if you need cores, you can get 14 core or 2 x 10 core Xeons for about the same price.

Vidar · 2 Jun 2016 at 03:15

How would this stack up in a gaming build, would it be overkill?

Aretak · 2 Jun 2016 at 04:25

Vidar said:
How would this stack up in a gaming build, would it be overkill?

It's pretty useless for gaming as things stand.

Obviously Haswell-E there, but Broadwell-E has nothing in the way of IPC improvements, and indeed seems to have trouble even reaching the same clock speeds. The extra cores won't do anything, since it's clear that 4 cores/8 threads is the most even a CPU-heavy game like GTA V is really capable of taking advantage of.

Of course in the future, some sunny day years down the line, games might make proper use of more cores and it could be more "futureproof" than a 6700K, but then we may have hex or octa cores on the mainstream platform by then, with much better IPC and less power draw at a lower price. Zen has the potential to not only shake things up itself, but force Intel into delivering more as well. I'd be surprised if we didn't see a hex core Cannonlake next year tbh.

joeyjojo · 2 Jun 2016 at 08:48

jigger said:
For a very similar price you can have a 28 thread 3.6Ghz chip with the options of adding a second CPU.

jigger said:
No not really. You would have no problem building a dual socket 20 core system for about the same price. Probably a lot less TBH.

jigger said:
I think it's the 2680 or 2690. Intel Ark will tell you

Sorry to be picky here jigger but this is why I asked for clarification as neither of those will help you get a "28 thread 3.6 GHz" system nor a "dual socket 20 core" system. Those are indeed 14-core parts but the clock speeds are a lot lower - the 2690 is fastest at 2.6 GHz base speed and that one's a lot more expensive than the i7 (about £1700 inc VAT).

As nkuk says a pair of E5-2640 v4 are promising for 20-cores but again low clock speed (2.4 GHz base) and more expensive (£1600 inc VAT).

Overall I think Intel have positioned these i7s pretty well actually. The high clocks probably make up for the fewer cores for the target market and the price is competitive.

JABenedicic · 2 Jun 2016 at 09:25

nkuk said:
I just read this on the Anandtech review:

"For $1721, if a user wants to invest in the i7-6950X but does not want the overclocking, they can invest in either the 14-core E5-2680 v4 for $1745 giving 40% more cores at a lower power with a slight decrease in frequency, or get double the cores in a 2P system and using the E5-2640 v4 processor: a 10-core 2.4 GHz/3.4 GHz part, running at 90W, for $939. Two of these runs a $1878, which is slightly more but having double the cores available might be the more important thing here."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10337...900k-6850k-and-6800k-tested-up-to-10-cores/12

It seems if you need cores, you can get 14 core or 2 x 10 core Xeons for about the same price.

In my opinion that's where consumer sites like Anand show a lack of understanding of the server range of CPUs.

It is like comparing a Transit Van to a Focus, they may come with the same engine and cost a similar amount but they are for very different purposes.

You wouldn't spend £1500 on a Xeon processor and stick it in a consumer X99 board, you are gimping the CPU and you aren't getting the most of the features it was really built for.

In virtualisation clock speed is relatively unimportant, also the number of cores is generally not as important as the amount of RAM you can cram into a box. Hence the Xeons supporting up to 1.5TB of RAM.

If you are purely after a virtualisation platform then yes you would get a good dual processor board, something with maybe 24 DIMM slots so you can make the most of the CPUs, but then we wouldn't be having this discussion here on this forum.

As I said in one of the other threads, the BW-E for me represents a nice balance, I can use it for gaming, video editing and streaming when I want to and when I'm not I'll have a few nested ESXi hosts that just add some resources to the rest of my lab.