In August 2014, Intel released the first Haswell-E processor, the Core i7-5960X. Unlike its predecessors, the Core i7-5960X jumped to eight cores and 16 threads — but the lower clock speeds that this required paradoxically made the chip a less-than-great alternative for gamers. In many titles, the 4.4GHz clock speed on the Core i7-4790K was a better gaming option than the eight cores but lower top-end clock speed (3GHz base, 3.5GHz Turbo) that the 5960X offered.
Intel is now working on the successor to Haswell-E, and if recent rumors are true, the company is going to address this discrepancy with the upcoming Broadwell-E. The upcoming family will launch with multiple SKUs that should address the needs of both gamers and other high-end users who have more use for threads and less for clock speed. According to Chinese site XFastest, the Core i7-6950X will be a 10-core, 20-thread CPU with a base clock of 3GHz, an unknown Turbo frequency, and 25MB of L3 cache. That's two more cores than the current Core i7-5960X, with an equivalent clock speed and the same cache allocation on a per-core basis