Intel Xeon E5-2650 vs Intel Core i7 X 980

Xeon E5-2650 vs Core i7 X 980 specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core i7 X 980 beats the Xeon E5-2650 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Xeon E5-2650 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Xeon E5-2650 has slightly more cores with 8 cores compared to the Core i7 X 980 that has 6 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i7 X 980. Our comparison shows that the Core i7 X 980 has a significantly higher clock speed compared to the Xeon E5-2650.

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Xeon E5-2650 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.