With 2015 halfway in the books, here is a look at CPUs ranked by sales thus far for the year. The top-seller is listed first; numbers 2-10 follow below.
The Intel Haswell-E family is well represented here, which indicates customers are overhauling their systems and using DDR4 memory in their builds.
Intel Core i7 processors appear to be the the go-to for B2B customers. This makes sense given the CPU demands of the custom workstations they are building. These machines are usually geared for video, photo, and audio production work, or for running other CPU intensive programs that benefit from a processor capable of hyper-threading.
It looks like Windows Server 2003 end of service has prompted some customers to build their own high performance servers, and virtualization is definitely on the agenda judging by the 10- and 14-core CPUs they are choosing.
Let’s have a look.
1. Intel Core i7-4790K Devil’s Canyon Quad-Core
| Release date | July 2014 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 4.0 |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 4.4 |
| Cores/Threads | 4/8 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 16 |
| Cache (MB) | 8 |
| Price | $340 |
This chip benchmarked 10-15 percent faster than its predecessor, the Intel Core i7-4770K, and runs cooler thanks to engineering that improved thermal transfer between the processor die and integrated heat spreader.
2. Intel Core i7-5960X Haswell-E 8-Core
| Release date | September 2014 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 3.0 |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 3.5 |
| Cores/Threads | 8/16 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 40 |
| Cache (MB) | 20 |
| Price | $1,050 |
The X stands for “extreme” in this top-line iteration of Haswell-E family of CPUs. Haswell-E systems utilize DDR4 memory. Newegg user reviews report stable overclocking speeds of 4.4 GHz.
3. Intel Core i7-5930K Haswell-E 6-Core
| Release date | September 2014 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 3.5 GHz |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 3.7 GHz |
| Cores/Threads | 6/12 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 40 |
| Cache (MB) | 15 |
| Price | $580 |
One level down from the i7-5960X and based on the same physical die, the i7-5930K has two cores disabled. It retains the full 40 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 and contains a quad-channel memory controller.
4. Intel Core i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core
| Release date | September 2014 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 3.3 GHz |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 3.6 Ghz |
| Cores/Threads | 6/12 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 28 |
| Cache (MB) | 15 |
| Price | $390 |
The entry-level tier of the Haswell-E platform has 28 PCI-e lanes compared to the 40 lanes housed in the two top-tier models. Business users like the value, using it for custom workstations that are called on to crunch through multi-threaded production applications.
5. Intel Core i7-4790 Haswell Quad-Core
| Release date | May 2014 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 3.6 |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 4.0 |
| Cores/Threads | 4/8 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 16 |
| Cache (MB) | 8 MB |
| Price | $310 |
A solid cost-to-performance ratio for this workstation standby keeps the 4790 in demand. A good choice for a new build or an upgrade, since it is DDR3-compatible.
6. Intel Xeon E5-2670 v2 Ivy Bridge
| Release date | August 2013 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 2.5 |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 3.3 |
| Cores/Threads | 10/20 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 40 |
| Cache (MB) | 25 |
| Price | $1,570 |
Power, performance and efficiency make this Ivy Bridge iteration a popular choice for companies custom building servers for virtualization and intensive software.
7. Intel Core i5-4460 Haswell Quad Core
| Release date | May 2014 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 3.2 |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 3.4 |
| Cores/Threads | 4/4 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 16 |
| Cache (MB) | 6 |
| Price | $190 |
Quad-core power for under $200 is attractive to business users looking to upgrade a system or build a new mid- to high-performance workstation for applications that benefit from multi-threading.
8. Intel Core i7-4770 Haswell Quad-Core
| Release date | April 2013 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 3.4 |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 3.9 |
| Cores/Threads | 4/8 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 16 |
| Cache (MB) | 8 |
| Price | $305 |
The oldest of all CPUs in the top ten continues to be a customer favorite more than two years after its launch.
9. Intel Xeon E5-2695 v3 Haswell
| Release date | September 2014 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 2.3 |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 3.3 |
| Cores/Threads | 14/28 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 40 |
| Cache (MB) | 35 |
| Price | $2,384 |
The mid-range 14-core offering offers a good efficiency to computing output ratio for DDR4 systems.
10. Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 Haswell
| Release date | September 2014 |
| Clock speed (GHz) | 2.4 |
| Max Turbo (GHz) | 3.2 |
| Cores/Threads | 6/12 |
| PCI Express Lanes | 40 |
| Cache (MB) | 15 |
| Price | $430 |
Possibly the best bang for your buck for a LGA 2011-3 socket CPU.
10 Best Selling CPUs of 2015 (so far)—which are you using for your new build this year?
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