Intel's high end desktop platform has been stagnant since Haswell-E launched in August of 2014 and while nearly 2 years may seem like an eternity for industry watchers, the new Broadwell-E processors are seeking to make up for lost time. From a company whose next moves are typically telegraphed well ahead of time, it is sometimes hard to generate any type of excitement around these launches but this time there's certainly a few elements that will cause even the most jaded of folks to sit up and take notice. It all starts with the first 10-core, 20-thread chip available to desktop users: the positively insane i7-6950X.

Ah Broadwell-E?.where do I start describing what Intel's transitional microarchitecture has been through to get to this point? Due to a set of unforeseen and likely pretty darn serious mishaps its initial desktop lineup never got past an infantile state before being replaced with the Skylake platform. Haswell's erstwhile 14nm LGA1150 desktop replacement has soldiered on in relative obscurity with a pair of SKU's: the i7-5775C and i5-5675C. To this day they represent Intel's proving ground for high level Iris Pro graphics rolled into a compact and pretty efficient desktop package. Their stillborn capabilities also offer a tantalizing look into what Team Blue could accomplish if they were sincerely interested in torpedoing AMD's APU lineup.