Intel rumoured to be working on 5.1 GHz quad core processor

If Intel’s recent string of announcements is anything to go by, we’d guess that AMD’s Zen has almost certainly gotten to them because now they’re reportedly working on a 5.1 GHz quad core Xeon processor.

Forgoing the usual mass threaded nature of Xeon processors, this quad core processor, meant for a very particular type of workload and going by the model number Xeon E5-2602 V4, is easily the highest clocked processor Intel has ever released.

Spec wise, the Xeon E5-2602 V4 will sport eight threads (courtesy of Hyper-Threading), 10 MB of L3 cache (2.5 MB per core) and a significant TDP of 165W – little surprise given what the CPU must need to remain stable.

For the moment, this monstrous quad core processor is nothing more than hearsay, but it’s no less interesting. According to WCCF Tech, this chip is being produced for the US National Security Agency.

While this means that the Xeon E5-2602 V4 is unlikely to be available to the public, we’d love to see what can be achieved in the areas of benchmarking and gaming, and how 8 ridiculously fast threads compares to something like Intel’s 20-thread Broadwell-E Core i7-6950X consumer processor.

Either way, this is going to be one hot CPU… literally.

It’s certainly not the sort of processor you’d slot in an ultra-compact PC. For that, Intel recommends their Skull Canyon solution, an NUC that just so happens to incorporate the surprisingly powerful Iris Pro 580 iGPU.

It’s another exciting Intel product we’d love to get our mitts on, as long as Intel doesn’t try to sell Skull Canyon as for the mainstream gamer.