Intel's X79 Extreme series platform has been out for a while now, but technology has started passing it by. In the three years since the X79 Extreme series platform was introduced, there have been three mainstream performance chipsets (Z77, Z87, and Z97) along with two sockets (1155 and 1150) that have added functionality, while we only got a refresh on the original X79 platform last year. The time has finally come for Intel to take the wraps off what has been more or less known for a while now with the introduction of the X99 platform and new Haswell-E processors.

Today Intel launches its new flagship processor, the Core i7 5960X, as the top processor in its product stack. Basic specifications on the Core i7 5960X are eight physical cores and, with Hyper Threading support, 16 threads of processing power. Also launching today with the 5960X will be the Core i7 5930K (a six core, 12 thread processor) and the 5820K that takes a step up from the 4820K with an additional pair of cores to make it a six core, 12 thread processor. While the 5960X has 20MB of dynamically shared cache, the 5930K sees only 15MB and the 5820K sees a further drop to 10MB of cache. Another key difference that sets these processors apart is that the Core i7 5820K sees a reduction in the amount of PCIe lanes to 29 PCIe lanes instead of the 40 seen on the 5930K and 5960X.

With the new platform and X99 chipset we see a new socket rather than the familiar LGA 2011 socket, with a revision to the socket labeled as LGA 2011-v3. While the socket is still a 2011 pin socket, earlier Exteme Edition socket 2011 CPUs are not compatible. To further separate the platforms, Intel has introduced DDR4 memory support and usage on the latest Hawell-E Core series processors as a way to further boost memory performance, albeit at the cost of some latency due to the change in voltage applied to the DIMMs and the timings that can be run with currently available memory ICs. It is much like what we saw with DDR3 DRAM as the process and ICs matured.