Intel's High End Desktop (HEDT) platform has long been the last bastion of the enthusiast in Intel's lineup. Dominating performance, flexible overclocking, and more cores than you can shake a stick at have drawn a stark contrast between it and mainstream or performance-class platform, a status quo which came into effect in 2011 when Sandybridge vastly simplified overclocking on a mainstream CPU. Haswell-E's launch in 2014 solidified that stranglehold on the enthusiast as the first generation to support DDR4 and as many as eight physical CPU cores and sixteen threads. Broadwell-E, launched today at Computex2016, takes new steps to feature yet more cores, and sees the debut of a new price bracket for the flagship Extreme Edition CPU.

Broadwell-E is the follow-up to Haswell-E, and forms the basis of the latest generation of HEDT systems. Developmentally classed as a ?tick? in Intel's nomenclature, the CPU makes use of the 14nm process node rather than 22nm seen on Haswell-E and Ivybridge-E. In common with other ?tick? developments Broadwell-E has key architectural similarities to Haswell-E, rather than amounting to a substantial change in underlying CPU design. Expectations therefore are tempered by realism, although it's hoped that the die shrink will be enough to offer something new to consumers.