For the past several years Intel has been at the forefront of PC performance when they launched the 2600K Sandy Bridge CPU. During this time AMD, their largest competitor, had refocused their efforts on building power efficient APU style processors which worked extremely well in small form factor machines. These didn't have the same power when it came to gaming and high-end computing as their FX line of CPUs was supposed to fill that gap. While they did have eight cores and overclocked quite well they ran extremely hot and still couldn't match the performance of the Intel LGA 115x.

Strangely enough while AMD had been absent from the performance PC space Intel didn't do much to increase performance either opting instead to include new and emerging features that much of the enthusiast sector largely ignored. Their latest iteration, Skylake and Kaby Lake, feature DDR4 memory, come with HyperThreading and 20 lanes of PCI Express making them virtually identical to the old Sandy Bridge with negligible performance gains largely due to an absence of competition.