―William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847), Chapter XLIV “Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.” With that said, Intel and NVIDIA sure are fucking us for all we're worth on premium components. I promise to explain this (tl dr: you can't easily overclock Xeons, and Amdahl's Law is bad shit). I'd since concluded that the black sheep Broadwell-E Extreme decacore is actually the best option for a very small class of users, including myself.
I thus felt weird several days later buying a 6950X ($1650 at Amazon). And because it’s a Xeon E5 processor processor, with the right motherboard a user can put two into the same machine for 20 cores/40 threads for only $1878, or only $150 more than the 10-core i7-6950X. The recently released Xeon Broadwell-EP processor list includes the Xeon E5-2640 v4: a 10-core 2.4 GHz/3.4 GHz part that runs at 90W, and is priced at $939, which compares favorably to the i7-6950X and its 10-cores at a 3.0 GHz/3.5 GHz clockspeeds. Intel is somewhat shooting itself in the foot with the pricing on the i7-6950X. Ian Cutress of Anandtech put it best in his Broadwell-E review: Broadly dismissed in reviews, its clock speed and microarchitecture are inferior to the much cheaper Skylake i7 6700K, its cost per core exceeds that of all but the largest Broadwell-EP Xeon E5 v4s, and it doesn't support multisocket configurations. ―John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Part IĪs I began researching recent years' incremental improvements to high-end desktop technologies, one thing seemed obvious: the Intel Broadwell-E Core i7 6950X was laughably useless, a processor distinguished only by its price, a money-grab narrowly targeted at suckers.
Therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold: as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts – as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.Īnd moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be deceivers, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues and that of every kind.” “Their way to the City lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a fair a fair wherein should be sold of all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long.