Intel’s 14nm family has a new king. At its Computex press conference, the massive chip-maker announced the follow-up to X99-based Haswell-E platform, known simply as Broadwell-E.
Broadwell-E brings some new features directed at PC performance enthusiasts. That includes support for four-channel DDR4 at 2,400 MHz, an extra 5MB of Smart Cache, and Turbo Boost 3.0.
The concept is much the same to Turbo Boost 2.0, in that Turbo Boost 3.0 tries to improve performance when there’s extra power, or the system is running cool. The difference here is that Turbo Boost 3.0 kicks in when an application is demanding single core performance. The chip chooses the most stable core and maxes out its clock speed for the duration.
Thankfully, the Broadwell-E chips use the same LGA2011v3 slot from Haswell-E, so the new CPUs are drop-in compatible with the old boards following a BIOS update. The X99 platform hasn’t changed much since its introduction with Haswell-E, and motherboards sit around $200, much cheaper than they used to be.
Intel is rolling out four new Extreme Edition processors in the Broadwell-E family, starting at around $450, and reaching almost $2,000.
At the top of the heap, the Core i7-6950X boasts ten cores, a first for Intel in the consumer space, with a 3.0GHz base clock, and 3.5GHz Turbo Boost. It’s also the most well equipped of the chips, with a full 25MB of Smart Cache. However, it carries a steep $1,723 price tag. We had the pleasure of reviewing the i7-6950X, so make sure to check out the review for a full performance write-up.
The still-impressive Core i7-6900K chops off two cores and 5MB of Smart Cache, but also lops a healthy $650 off the price. The clock speed is a bit higher too, reaching a 3.2GHz base clock and 3.7GHz Turbo Boost. The i7-6900K closely resembles the i7-5960X in terms of cores and cache, but the newer generation is .2Ghz faster in both base and Turbo Boost, plus all the new features. It’s pricing is just a little higher than the previous generation too, which fell at about $1,000 even.
Finally, the two six-core chips, the 3.6GHz Core i7-6850K and 3.4GHz Core i7-6800K offer the best price point for potential buyers. They sit at just $617 and $434 respectively, but it isn’t just binning for clock speed that sets them apart. The Core i7-6800K cuts back on PCIe lanes, with support for just 28 instead of the 40 the i7-6850K and above support. That’s not quite enough for two cards at PCIe x16, so make sure you don’t plan on going SLI before stepping up to the new platform.
No word yet on general availability, but with Core i7-6950X review units already out in the World, it can’t be long before the rest follow.
After five years with Apple silicon, from the original M1 MacBook Air to the M5 MacBook Air released earlier this year, I've watched these chips mature not just on the spec sheet, but in real-world workflows and overall efficiency.
The new M6 chip might sound like a routine generational upgrade, but it's the company's first chip built on a 2nm manufacturing process, which brings meaningful improvements over previous Apple chips.
Gemini Notebook’s mobile app now has a built-in recorder for capturing lectures and meetings as sources. You can record directly where you’ll use the material, skipping the separate recording app and the file upload afterward.
Google announced the feature on X, highlighting classroom lectures and team meetings as potential uses. It also works for capturing your own thoughts, so you can talk through an idea and bring that explanation into your notebook while it’s still fresh.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?