Part of a new platform for cloud computing. Technology giant Intel has multiple processors for the mobile, client and server segments. Each is home to various chips based on recent architectures, and these include Skylake, Broadwell and Haswell in reverse chronological order spanning the last three years.

What's interesting is that Intel uses different architectures for different segments. The consumer desktop and mobile line is spearheaded by the sixth-generation Skylake architecture whereas, until yesterday, the premium server line, known as Xeon E5, was powered by the fourth-generation Haswell. The slower pace of architecture evolution for the server and workstation can be explained by the two-fold reasoning of Intel having very little genuine competition in the area and a need for platforms that last multiple years.

Today, though, Intel is changing it up by releasing a slew of new Xeon E5 chips equipped with Broadwell technology. They aren't the first Xeons to do so - that accolade goes to the SoC-based Xeon D and Xeon E3 v4 from last year - but by updating to Broadwell across its most popular mainstream processors Intel is adding more performance and more cores for the same financial outlay.