Intel Launches The Core i7 5960X, Mighty Powerful Haswell-E CPUs

This morning Intel is lifting the lid on their Intel Core i7 high-end desktop processors for the LGA 2011-v3 socket. This new CPU line-up is what's been referred to as Haswell-E. We are in the process of testing Intel's Core i7 5960X Haswell-E under Linux but for now here's an overview of the new hardware.

Our Intel Haswell-E review sample is expected to arrive shortly (hopefully later today) for our Linux testing. Due to the delay in getting the hardware, the article today is just a preview piece while by next week we should have had plenty of time for benchmarking this new Extreme Edition CPU against other systems for making a very interesting Linux performance comparison.

The new Intel Core i7 CPUs launching today utilize the LGA 2011-v3 socket and come in six and eight core versions. These new CPUs also usher in the Intel X99 Chipset as the latest high-end EE chipset that also brings DDR4 memory support to the desktop.

The Intel Core i7 5960X Extreme Edition is the new beauty that's an eight core processor with Hyper Threading to amount to 16 threads (compared to six cores + HT for recent EE CPUs), supports DDR4-2133MHz memory, 3.0GHz base frequency, and a 3.5GHz Turbo frequency. This CPU is also fully unlocked for maximizing the performance potential even more if you are up for overclocking. The i7-5960X has 20MB of Intel Smart Cache, Turbo Boost 2.0, and 40 PCI Express 3.0 lanes.