Honest question, because I'm actually curious about this. Are these extreme edition chips used almost exclusively by enthusiasts, or are they actually used in certain software engineering branches?
Most enthusiasts don't buy top of the line. It's way cheaper to buy the "second best" and overclock your way to the Extreme Edition's performance (which is really easy with the new chips).
The second best in this case is i7-3930K, same 6 cores and architecture (just 100MHz difference) but with less cache (12MB vs 15MB) at half the price.
Thanks for the response. That makes sense, obviously you can pay a lot less and get more by overclocking the CPU. Then my question is, who actually buys these chips, and for what purpose?
Well, isn't this basic differential pricing? If there are customers who are willing to "pay as much as needed" for "the fastest chip they have", why wouldn't Intel offer it? It shouldn't be too expensive to "brand" yet another model, and there are enough enthusiasts to shell the required cash on this thing. $1K isn't that much, really.
