All things must come to an end, and Intel has decided that it's time to retire their Broadwell-E line of processors. The Broadwell-E family is comprised of four models: the Intel Core i7-6800K, 6850K, 6900K and 6950X. According to the Product Change Notification (PCN) document, Intel is still accepting orders until May 25, 2018, while the last shipment is scheduled for November 9 of the same year. So, there is still sufficient time left for those who plan to acquire one of the aforementioned models. However, we don't see any reason to do so now considering that there are far better options on the market.

Broadwell-E processors debuted last year and were received with mixed reactions. With just one year under their belt, they were eventually replaced by the more powerful Skylake-X models. Intel is probably getting rid of their unsold inventory of Broadwell-E models. Who knows? Maybe we'll even see some price cuts in the not-so-near future.

Some outlets are reporting that Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity is about to receive the much-referred-to patch that allows for improved performance on AMD's Ryzen line of processors. If you remember, rivers of ink flowed regarding AMD's Ryzen performance in gaming, with its monstrous, high-performance 8-core, 16-threaded design sometimes delivering performance below expectations. At the time, AMD clarified how Ryzen is a distinctive CPU architecture, similar yet fundamentally different from Intel's x86 implementation, promising upcoming patches from game developers that would allow Ryzen's architecture to truly deliver.

After Creative Assembly and Oxide Games vouched to improve Ryzen support, Oxide seems to be the first developer with a patch available (from version 25624 to 26118) that improves performance by up to 30%. Reportedly, it took the developers around 400 work-hours to improve the game code in respect to its execution on AMD hardware.

AMD's Ryzen 7 lower than expected performance in some applications seems to stem from a particular problem: memory. Before AMD's Ryzen chips were even out, reports pegged AMD as having confirmed that most of the tweaks and programming for the new architecture had been done in order to improve core performance to its max - at the expense of memory compatibility and performance. Apparently, and until AMD's entire Ryzen line-up is completed with the upcoming Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 processors, the company will be hard at work on improving Ryzen's cache handling and memory latency.

Hardware.fr has done a pretty good job in exploring Ryzen's cache and memory subsystem deficiencies through the use of AIDA 64, in what would otherwise be an exceptional processor design. Namely, the fact that there seems to be some problem with Ryzen's L3 cache and memory subsystem implementation. Paired with the same memory configuration and at the same 3 GHz clocks, for instance, Ryzen's memory tests show memory latency results that are up to 30 ns higher (at 90 ns) than the average latency found on Intel's i7 6900K or even AMD's FX 8350 (both at around 60 ns).