The I7 6960X sounds exciting--anything with the the number "69" has GOT to be exciting--but I will go with the 5960X and not have to wait. I have waited long enough, friend . . . and I will get my 69-thrills elsewhere. . ..

The i7-5960X has enough speed already. And enough cores, enough cache. More than enough, really.

It has a weak iMC. Barely able to sustain JEDEC speeds if you populate all the DIMMs - entirely hit or miss if you plan to run fast XMP or overclock anything. If this new "i7-6960X" accomplishes nothing else but beefs up the iMC (so that people could actually load up their X99 with huge fast DDR4, overclock the CPU, not have to tweak the BCLK, and still run stable) then we would have a winner.

More PCIe lanes would be nice, too, maybe x56 or x64, eh? For raw multi-GPU awesome sauce if nothing else, although more superfast storage is always good too. It's already difficult to saturate all the processor cores and cache through PCIe, suggesting that more lanes could easily be accomodated before things get bottlenecked.

Is there going to be a 6960X?, will it be Haswell E or Brodwell E?, will it be in quarter 1? will the world come to an end before quarter 1
Hardliner, forums are rated G, talk like that will have HARDware geeks knocking on your door

My dream car is the '69 Camaro . . . and this car looks like the perfect ROG car--the right colors AND awesome!:

Nobody actually knows if there's going to be a 6960X. There's a lot of speculation about the latest (2017) roadmaps which have "leaked" out of Intel. All anyone outside the plants really knows for sure at this time is that 10nm Cannonlake is supposed to be the Next Huge (Tiny) Thing ... the introduction of a "6960X" is really just speculation, along with a part number which fits the existing pattern.

Intel could just as easily introduce any random new part with a random part name/number as they can declare the X99 platform EOL and move on. It seems kinda obvious that i7-58xx/59xx systems sold really well so it's not unreasonable to expect a new LGA2011-3 proc to come out (lol, "6960X" or "Skylake Refresh" or whatever), the better media/review sites are making smarter guesses, the horde is basically just inventing specs for what they expect/want the chips to have or they're quoting and misquoting each other's partial information. We don't know anything about "6960X" at this time, Intel might "leak" out more information every few weeks (as they often do) to let the hype feed itself so everybody knows about and wants (and plans upgrades around) their new products by the time they're actually launched - let's face it, they haven't got any real competition, they can and will do whatever they want to milk revenue.

Intel wouldn't want to piss off it's large enterprise customer base by switching to an incompatible socket and chipset. Generally, Intel will go with the same socket and chipset for 3 generations of chips. Haswell-E was the first on the X99, so, if history repeats itself, there should be 2 more generations to come on that platform...Broadwell-E and Skylake-E (along with the -EP and -EX varieties with the C61X chipset). Now, with Intel extending the life of the 14nm process node with Kaby Lake, does that mean there will be a 4th, Kaby Lake-E?...who knows but Intel's strategy people.

When looking at when a next generation component will arrive, it will probably depend the maturity of the 14nm production. There was recently a large shortage of Broadwell and Skylake chips and Intel is working to get shipping volumes up to where the market demand is. Might Intel skip Broadwell-E now and go straight to Skylake-E? That would probably depend on validation of the Skylake microarchitecture to be stable with enterprise workloads.

One thing I know is: the X99 platform I/O is already old and in a year or two, it will be pretty much ancient with the rate the electronics industry moves. The new X99 motherboards that come out are going to have a stupid number of third party I/O controllers which will be quite a bit inferior to I/O native to the ZXX0 chipsets as they are regularly refreshed.