The company is content with keeping the maximum count at six

Nov 1, 2012 14:35 GMT  ·  By

A well-made 8-core Intel central processing unit would easily demolish every high-end CPU on the consumer market right now, but Intel does not think that single bragging right is worth the bother.

One might say that it is quite curious how Intel doesn't actually want to enable the seventh and eighth cores on the Ivy Bridge-E silicon. Maybe with Vishera the way it is, it doesn't feel the need, or figures it could be a good trump card.

Indeed, the next-generation ultra-high-end central processing units have eight physical cores, and could be sold as such to companies in need of strong servers or workstations.

Consumers will never get to enjoy such things though. The best Core i7 chips will still be 6-core units, with 15 MB of L3 cache memory instead of 20.

At least the PCI Express Ge 3.0 certified root complex will be present (better video graphics card performance).

The third quarter of 2013 is when sales of 22nm-based Ivy Bridge-E CPUs begin. Buyers will need to get LGA 2011 motherboard for them.