These last few years Intel was much working much more on bring power consumption down than ... anything else? The performance changed little: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs... 20%? But now the 15W U series mobile chips deliver the same performance as 35W M chips in the Sandy/Ivy Bridge era which is quite impressive.

This, of course, leads to a tremendous advantage in server CPUs -- if you have capable cores at a lower wattage, you can add more of them. Hence the 14 core E5-2690V4 @ 135W at 2.6Ghz vs 8 core E5-2690 @ 135W at 2.9GHz. So in just four generations from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell, no TDP change, roughly the same or a bit better single thread execution but almost double the core count. If you are willing to drop a tiny bit your base clock further and your TDP higher, perhaps 10% less single thread performance, you can get a hulk of a 24 core E7-8890V4 at 165W. And that's where the big profit is -- currently.

Now some unfounded nonsense: what if Intel is not pulling these crazy prices out of their sorry behind but there's in fact some reality behind them? It just bothers me that the price of the 24 core chip is so close to the 6*6 times of a 4 core chip. It could be a coincidence.