Hardware Intel's Monstrous Core i7-6950X Confirmed In Support Documents

All the scenarios I see this being useful for could all be accomplished with a dual socket 1366 system from yesteryear for a fraction of the price.

 

You're right, let's just knock development on the head here and now

 

But that 1366 system could be destroyed by knocking together eight, much cheaper Q6600 rigs that are chained to work on the workload together. Jeez!

Just think how much a dual socket 1366 board and two decent Xeon's would have cost you back in the day. It would probably have been significantly north of £1500.

 

In termps of initial outlay, maybe, but the actual running costs will be a lot higher (1366 is really power hungry) and the Broadwell-E will likely be a heck of a lot more powerful even at the moderate frequency of 3.5GHz because of the newer architecture. Two cores and four threads down, I'd bet the newer system will walk circles round any dual-socket 1366 system.

If anything, this CPU presents the perfect alternative to aging dual-socket 1366 systems that need a power station to run them.

I haven't yet decided what I'll upgrade to after I grow out of the 1366 platform; even the 6900K looks like a nice buy, being a little bit higher clocked than the 5960X and probably identical in every other regard.

 

but you need twice the ram and the space as well and needs to be a xeon

still in between just going for highest single threaded performance for games (6700k @4.6ghz ish) or 6-8 core or higher CPU so the tasks i do (any thing is going to be faster then the 980x and the 920 at this point) 6700k and the 5960X still faster then what i have on my 2 systems

some who streams KSP on twitch does not seem to understand having a 6 core 1st gen cpu does not mean its faster then a 6700k even at stock (seems to think overlocking it will gain much, 6700k is considerably faster) game is still quite single threaded limited (physx has been loosened up as it now uses each ship as its own physx per thread) and its 64bit now so can use more then 3.8gb of ram as that was a problem before

 

^ Truth. Single threaded performance on 1366 systems started showing its age even when the i5 2500K came along... how many years ago?! If single threaded performance was an important consideration for me, I wouldn't still have a 1366 rig!

 

That's not what I'm saying. Assuming intel places the same limits as the 5960X, we get no ECC and 64GB max memory. Whats the point? Gaming doesn't benefit from >6 cores, so we must be talking workstation/server workloads, in which case for $1500 USD, why not just a buy a full fledged Xeon?

 

I'm pretty sure that every reply since mine poses answers the "why" and I'm also pretty sure the "" implies my post was tongue-in-cheek.

 

What games are you playing for which a 64GB memory limit would be a problem?

 

I'm pretty sure use-case numero uno for which intel are catering here is waving ones e-wang.

Does anyone buy an X for any reason other than it being the fastest and most expensive?

 

There is usage cases where it's a major benefit and still significantly cheaper than the Xeon equivalents. Video creation been one of the big ones. 4K video rendering needs every bit of help it can get.

Games will never get past 4 cores in truth ( ignoring AMDs 8core chips which are just 4 cores still) the code required to scale correctly to 6 cores or 8 would still need to work on 2 and 4 just as well. You code in gaming for your market not the 1%.

VR may take the memory requirements to 16gb ( Elites recommended spec on VIVE is that already) maybe in 20 years 64gb will be a needed thing. Memory requirements have stalled in all but the newest games a flat 4gb is still enough. League and Dota will make do with 1gb or less.

 

It wasn't that long ago all games would run with 4GB. Now we're touching 16GB. I reckon between 5 and 10 years (hopefully).

 

Battlefield 4 uses a lot more than 4 cores when playing in multiplayer.

When you write a multi-thread program more than likely you just use threads willy-nilly in your code and let the operating system assign them to cores. You don't really worry about how many cores the end user has. If the threads have to run concurrently on a single core because there aren't enough cores for true parallel execution then so be it.

For example if you had a number of enemies that each operated in their own thread, you would start a new thread for each enemy in play, you don't need to worry about how many cores the end user has. The CPU and operating system can handle that themselves without the programmer having to do any more than starting the thread.

Edit: Out of curiosity I checked on resource monitor recently which told me battlefield was using 54 threads. That's a lot of threads.

 

Looks like upgrade time is coming again!

 

It will be interesting to see some real benchmarks on these versus their older Quad Core counterparts.

 

Good for content creation, 4k video, multitasking, home server perhaps, one-upmanship in the enthusiast segment. Not much in it for gamers right now.