It seems that the rumours were indeed true. Today, Intel has officially unveiled its brand new Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition, the Core i7-6950X. Said to be the most powerful consumer-level Intel desktop processor at the moment, it is the successor to the previous Core i7 Extreme Edition processor – the Core i7-5960X – which was released in 2014.
One of the main characteristics of the Core i7-6950X which makes it more powerful than the previously released consumer-level desktop processor from Intel is its 10 processing cores. That equals to 20 processing threads thanks to Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology.
Built using 14nm tri-gate 3D transistors, the processor also supports the new driver-based Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology which automatically determines the most resource-hungry workload, and allocates it to the fastest core in the chip.
At the same time, Intel also included three new overclocking features into the chip such as per core overclocking, AVX ratio offset, and VccU voltage control. In terms of performance improvements, here are what being claimed by Intel:
Despite being new, the Core i7-6950X still supports the Intel X99 chipset which should be good news to those who already own an X99-based motherboards. Apart from that, Intel also launched several more Broadwell-E processors alongside the Core i7-6950X in the form of an 8-core Core i7-6900K, as well as the 6-core Core i7-6850K and Core i7-6800K.
Here are the general specifications of all four of the Broadwell-E processors that Intel has launched today:
As you can see from the table above, the Core i7-6950X carries a rather hefty price tag which translates to around RM 6,454. Given that it is the first 10-core desktop processor for consumers, we were not surprised of the price but we do wonder how much will it really cost once it reaches our shores.
Those of you eyeing to get this, you better get your wallet sufficiently prepared.
