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Intel Flagship Core i7-6950X Broadwell-E To Offer 10-Cores, 20-Threads, 25MB L3 (hothardware.com)

Posted by timothy on from the upping-the-count dept.

MojoKid writes: Intel has made a habit of launching enthusiast versions of previous generation processors after it releases a new architecture. As was the case with Intel's Haswell architecture, high-end Broadwell-E variants are expected and it looks like Intel is readying a doozy. Recently revealed details show four new processors under the new HEDT (High-End Desktop) banner for Broadwell, which is one more SKU than Haswell-E brought to the table. The most intriguing of the new chips is the Core i7-6950X, a monster 10-core CPU with Hyper Threading support. That gives the Core i7-6950X 20 threads to play with, along with a whopping 25MB of L3 cache. The caveat is the CPU's clockspeed — it will run at just 3.0GHz (base), so for applications that aren't properly tuned to take full advantage of large core counts and threads, it could potentially trail behind the Core i7-6700K, a quad-core Skylake processor clocked at 3.4GHz (base) to 4GHz (Turbo).

2 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:20 cores DOES matter by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was under the (admittedly vague) impression that was true only if the thread was using floating point.

    CPUs that offer more cores and/or threads than they do FPUs is one of the reasons I write a lot of my multi-threaded stuff (image and baseband RF processing) utilizing appropriately scaled integer math.

    I have 8 cores with 8 FPUs on my desk, but many of my users are stuck with some of the wheezier I5 variants.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  2. Re: 20 cores DOES matter by m.dillon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, parallel builds barely touch the storage subsystem. Everything is basically cached in ram and writes to files wind up being aggregated into relatively small bursts. So the drives are generally almost entirely idle the whole time.

    It's almost a pure-cpu exercise and also does a pretty good job testing concurrency within the kernel due to the fork/exec/run/exit load (particularly for Makefile-based builds which use /bin/sh a lot). I've seen fork/exec rates in excess of 5000 forks/sec during poudriere runs, for example.

    -Matt