Intel's new 48-core Xeon: 200MHz faster, costs $8898

AMD will own the 16-threaded consumer CPU market within the next 6-12 months, but Intel is still fighting the good fight in the Xeon area with the introduction of the new Broadwell-EX XCC (Extreme Core Count) die that features 24C/48T of CPU processing power.

Intel's new Xeon E7-8894 v4 features 24 CPU cores with 48 threads in total thanks to Hyper-Threading, as well as a huge 60MB of L3 cache, 165W TDP, and default clocks of 2.4GHz and Turbo clocks of 3.4GHz. But it's the massive price that will have you worried: $8898... yeah, that's right - nearly $10K.

But don't worry, if you want to shave off 200Mhz there's the Xeon E7-8890 v4 which has identical specs - except its default frequency is just 2.2GHz (down from 2.4GHz) and Intel sells that for $7147. This represents a 24% increase in price, for a 9% increase in stock frequency - worth it? Yeah, nah.