Intel's Core i7-5960X is its first ever eight-core processor for the general public. You could have bought a vastly more expensive octocore Xeon to drop into an old PC, but this is the full Core monty. And it's a bit special.There sure is a lot of silicon given over to the graphical components of most of today's other processors though. Intel's standard Haswell architecture throws millions of transistors at its HD graphics component, and AMD's latest Kaveri chips are only a couple of percentage points from being a complete half-and-half split between processor and graphics.For us enthusiast-type folk, though ? more used to strapping a big shiny graphics card to our motherboard than relying on weak-heart integrated GPUs ? that's a lot of redundant die space we're paying for. It also sounds like an awful lot of space we could be shoving extra CPU cores into, doesn't it? And that's exactly what Intel's high-performance CPU range has been doing for the last few years. The Extreme line of Intel's processors represents the pinnacle of its desktop chips, cramming in more cores than any desktop chip available. For the most part, anyway.But despite shrinking in production process, even the Extreme range has been stuck fast at six cores for a long while. That's despite AMD already banging the octo-core drum ? albeit to little effect ? and Intel's own server parts rocking six cores and 12 threads over four years ago.Finally though, Intel has decided to up the ante on its Extreme consumer chips and is giving us a bona fide eight-core processor with the top end of its new Haswell-E processors. The Core i7-5960X is that chip, and is the first octo-core chip with Intel's powerful Core architecture squeezed inside.