Intel's latest flagship processor raises the bar even higher over its predecessors. Broadwell-E uses a 14nm manufacturing process instead of the 22nm used on Haswell, making it smaller while delivering key intelligent core management and clock speed optimizations. It also supports more memory and has 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes for those looking to build a powerful desktop.
Unlike the previous generation, which only supported up to eight cores and had a high-end model that cost a fortune, the new processors come with six to 10 cores and are more affordable. They're still expensive, but they have a much wider appeal than their predecessors.
The cores are the same as in Haswell, but the new 14nm manufacturing process gives them a smaller footprint and lower power consumption. Intel did make some adjustments to the microarchitecture, including a faster divider, improved branch prediction, a larger scheduler and a reduced AVX multiplier latency from five cycles down to three.
The result is a chip that's a true performance monster. In multi-threaded workloads, like a CPU rendering test based on Maxon's Cinema4D software, the 10-core chip thrashes the previous generation. It can also hang with the quad-core Skylake chip in lightly threaded and single-threaded tasks.