The Intel Broadwell-E Review: Core i7-6950X, i7-6900K, i7-6850K and i7-6800K Tested

What would you do with more CPU cores? This is a question I see posted from an Intel employee on a yearly basis, and it actually is a difficult question to answer depending on your computing background. A gamer might not need more than four or six, and a number of workstation use cases are now GPU accelerated. Anyone never in a pure compute situation might not need more than four or six cores. So what: virtual machines, complex encoding, or non-linear functional compute? How many cores are too many? Intel has recently released the Broadwell-based Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors, running up to 22 cores, and the smaller silicon die used for the 10-core parts has today filtered down to the prosumer and high-end desktop (HEDT) markets in four different parts. We managed to source all four for this review.