Ah, Skylake-E. Or Kaby Lake-E if they skip Skylake-E. Yeah, that would be later this year.
I know in some of the first Zen benchmarks (in the summer, maybe late spring), AMD was comparing a 3 GHz Zen to a 3 GHz Broadwell, in order to demonstrate that they got better performance clock-per-clock, while also not revealing what clockspeed Zen would be released as (they likely hadn't nailed that down themselves at that point either). So both chips were not running at their top clocks, but the point of those early demos wasn't that, but that they could actually compete in instructions per cycle, since they'd been getting destroyed in that for years with Bulldozer and its successors. They were also clear at those demos that both chips were set to the same 3 GHz speed.
While yes, eventually it will be interesting to see how Intel responds, as mentioned their typical upgrades haven't given reason to wait for the new release unless it's imminent (which Intel's aren't, and AMD's soon will be). There's always something to wait for in PC hardware, but sooner or later you have to make a call or you'll be waiting forever.
As for the TDPs, if Intel can sell a 3.3 GHz quad-core Broadwell at 65W (and the same for Skylake), you'd think they could manage their 3.4 GHz hex-core Broadwell somewhere around 100-105W, but that's still listed at 140W. So's the 10-core, (admittedly 3.0 vs 3.4 GHz) $1723 processor though. So maybe they're just giving the whole E-line the same TDP? Despite the slower clock speed I'd expect the 10-core to consume some more power. Not saying Intel can manage 95W for an octo-core at desktop frequencies and mainstream prices - although they have 45W laptop quads that, if doubled, would amount to 90W octos at not that far below desktop clocks, and they've done more impressively in some server chips - but they may well be at least a little below 140W for the octos already if the 140 is a whole-line figure.
On the other hand, if they're increasing the voltage a fair amount on the 6/8 core Broadwell-E's over the slower-clocked 3 GHz ten-core, maybe they are using similar amounts of power. I know through overclocking my laptop's Core 2 Extreme that a relatively small amount of megahertz can require a relatively significant amount of additional voltage, and power consumption is related to voltage-squared, so it wouldn't be inconceivable that the extra 200 MHz on the 8-core over the 10-core really does keep power use similar, and again that at least on the 3.6 GHz hex-core, the extra 400 MHz might require enough additional voltage to negate most of the power gains. It would have to be significant to cancel out 40% fewer cores, but seeing the difference my CPU needs between 2.4 GHz and 2.8 GHz (25% more power from just voltage, before adding in the difference due to frequency), let alone 3.0 GHz, maybe it is that significant.
Now I kind of want to buy a 10-core Broadwell-E and a motherboard that would allow disabling cores to experiment with, but that definitely would blow a hole in my budget.
