Intel Core i7-6950X
The world’s first consumer deca-core processor. Now, who’s paying?
THIS IS THE BIGGY. The very latest word in ultra-enthusiast desktop processing—the 10-core Intel Core i7-6950X. And what a beastly slice of silicon it is. While Intel’s processing cadence is stuttering at the standard consumer end, its “tick-tock” release schedule is still on track in the high-end desktop (HEDT) arena. So long as you forgive the fact it’s taken two years to move from Haswell-E to Broadwell-E.
That aside, the 6950X is the pinnacle of the high-end tick, taking the existing Haswell core architecture, and shrinking down the smallest transistors to a freakishly tiny 14nm lithography. Because it’s just an Intel tick, though, little else has fundamentally changed between this and the previous HEDT chip, the Core i7-5960X.
There’s the same 140W TDP, the same 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes, and the same 3GHz/3.5GHz base/Turbo clock speeds. You do get a slight revision in the Turbo Boost technology, and the base DDR4 memory support has been upped from 2,133MHz to 2,400MHz, but that’s pretty much it. OK, we’ll stop ignoring that wrinkly gray thing in the room—there’s also another two cores.
Now, before you get too excited—and, we’ll acquiesce, a deca-core consumer processor is definitely exciting—Intel isn’t just throwing those extra two cores into the new generation of processors for free, as it did with the shift from the six cores of Ivy Bridge-E’s i7-4960X to the eight of Haswell-E’s i7-5960X. That’s because this isn’t a direct successor to the previous generation’s top processor; this chip sits outside of even those upper echelons of unaffordable silicon. This is the Titan X of CPUs. A chip designed not to really interact with the rest of Intel’s range; a chip for those with very specialist multi-threaded needs, or the pay checks and must-have mentalities of top-end ball-players. And, as such, it comes with a frankly offensive $1,569 price tag. So, yeah, those extra two cores are going to cost you another $569 over the previous generation’s best.
The actual successor to the Core i7-5960X (Haswell-E) is the tantalizing Core i7-6900K, an eight-core, $999 CPU with the same spec as the top Haswell-E chip, but with a 3.2GHz base clock and a 3.7GHz Turbo clock. We’re holding out hope that’s the king overclocker of the range. There’s also a ginger stepchild of a six-core CPU in the circa-$600 i7-6850K, and another six-core, which is genuinely exciting. The i7-6800K is a $400 chip that could form the base of some stunningly affordable HEDT PCs, which will either cannibalize Skylake’s 6700K or force some price reductions. PERFORMANCE ART But let’s forget the outrageous cost for a second and consider performance—in that, the 6950X is unsurpassed. In multithreaded tasks, it slices through all that’s put in front of it with ease. With Cinebench R15 and the x264 encoding test, the Broadwell-E chip is well out in front of the best that Haswell-E could offer. It’s not just by virtue of those extra cores either, which bodes well for both the 6900K and 6800K—the single-core performance of the 6950X has improved, too. There’s still a SpeedStep issue with the Asus board we used for testing, which afflicted the Haswell-E chips, too, but with that turned off, you get the same improved single-core performance the Core i7-5775C (desktop Broadwell) exhibited.
That boosts the gaming performance, too, despite the Broadwell-E chip not Turbo-ing as high as its older sibling. The 6950X sticks around 3.4GHz for the most part, while the 5960X at stock speeds will consistently Turbo at 3.5GHz. In our initial testing, it missed the overclocking mark by 100MHz, with the latest chip topping out at 4.3GHz, while our 5960X happily hit 4.4GHz. That said, the 6950X did deliver an astounding score of 2,220 in Cinebench.
As expected, then, the 6950X is the very best in consumer processing, and will eat multi-threaded tasks for breakfast, followed by single-threaded ones for a Shire-ish second breakfast. But it’s not the Broadwell-E chip we’re going to be recommending. It’s prohibitively priced, sits aside from the real meat of the Broadwell-E range, and almost only serves to demonstrate the engineering might of Intel’s 14nm process by delivering the desktop its first deca-core CPU. And while it has pushed the six-core chips into a more affordable price point, it hasn’t managed to do the same for the static eight-core.
It’s a halo product—a technological wonder, rather than anything we would honestly recommend.