It’s already been a big year in the CPU market with the successful launch of AMD’s Ryzen CPUs. But it’s not over yet: Intel has a new line of CPUs of their own, starting with Skylake-X in June this year.
It all started with this image, which has flown around enthusiast forums and sites like wildfire over the last 24 hours:
It’s taken from what appears to be a manufacturing presentation outlining Intel’s Skylake-X series of CPUs. The most important element is that it takes away one of the main advantages AMD has with Ryzen right now: the i9 series starts with the hexacore/12 threaded i9-7800X, and goes all the way up to a 12 core/24 threaded i9-7920X, which will presumably settle into the same territory that the Broadwell-E/Haswell-E CPUs have done.
For those focusing on more affordable gaming rigs, major changes include a bump in the available L2 cache to 1MB per core. The i7-7740K will become the new i7-7700K more or less, but from there every CPU will have 6 cores or more. Here’s the rumoured specs from the deck above:
Core i9-7920X
12C/24T
16.5MB L3
44 PCIe lanesCore i9-7900X
10C/20T
13.75MB L3
44 PCIe Lanes
3.3Ghz Base, 4.3Ghz Turbo 2.0, 4.5Ghz Turbo 3.0Core i9-7820X
8C/16T
11MB L3
28 PCIe Lanes
3.6Ghz Base, 4.3Ghz Turbo 2.0, 4.5Ghz Turbo 3.0Core i9-7800X
6C/12T
8.25MB L3
28 PCIe Lanes
3.5Ghz Base, 4.0Ghz Turbo 2.0Core i7-7740K
4C/8T
8MB L3
16 PCIe Lanes
4.3Ghz Base, 4.5Ghz Turbo 2.0
Clock speeds for the i9-7920X haven’t been leaked or revealed, and the chip supposedly won’t be out until August anyway. As an added note, it’s worth noting that all of this is rumoured at this point.
That said, benchmarks have started to appear online. Earlier this morning, a listing surfaced on the SiSoftware benchmarking database featuring an Intel 6 core/12 threaded CPU running off the Basin Falls platform, which is expected to power Intel’s Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs:
In short, you can expect Intel to pitch the i9-7820X against the Ryzen 7 1800X, the i9-7800X against the Ryzen 7 1700X, and the i7-7740K against the Ryzen 5 CPUs for the gaming enthusiast crowd. The rumoured leak adds that Skylake-X chips will also support DDR4-2666MHz memory, which isn’t much of a surprise given that we’re in 2017.
It will be nice to see a 12 core CPU in 2017, but the reality is the 6 core or 8 core will be the most affordable and logical options for most gamers and consumers. We’ll find out more about the CPUs in the coming months: Intel might have cancelled their annual developer forum for this year, but they’ve overtaken AMD as the sponsor of the PC Gaming Show at E3, and there’s always Computex later this month. And as always, as soon as we know local pricing we’ll pass the word along.
Comments
4 responses to “Report: Intel Will Introduce The i9 Series Later This Year”
All well and good to have more cores, however the clock speeds are slower, so single thread performance (including games) will actually be slower on these (than a 7700K, for example)… Same as the Ryzen CPUs…
Great for video encoding and stuff though…
Was the same case with Broadwell-E etc. versus the Skylake/Kaby Lake enthusiast CPUs as well.
What will be interesting is more on AMD’s side. Intel has the problem that as core counts increase, more silicon space (and thus also power) must be used in order to maintain cache coherency. AMD with its core complex design only maintains coherency between 4 cores, and copies out cache data cross fabric when needed.
Whilst the fabric approach is slower from a cache access perspective, a tonne less silicon is used maintaining that coherency, so clockspeeds may be as high as any other current Ryzen part.
Also, I can’t see Intel pricing these aggressively enough again threadripper in the first place.
so I9, I7, I5 and I3?
seems overly complicated, especially when you start throwing in mobile cpu (is that still a thing?)
This isn’t compatible with the current boards – people need to be aware they will have to upgrade to the new rumoured “X299” platform and intel won’t cut costs – this thing will be expensive as hell as they won’t canablise their pricing.
And there is no “affordable” option even for the i7 compatible variant – you will still be paying for a brand new high end enthusiast board.
The Ryzen 9’s have also rumoured to leak with 16, 14, 12 and 10 core models and will much like the current lineup – probably be under half what intel is asking for, while adding in quad channel memory support and decent speeds.
Its in everyone’s best interest right now to wait – but there is a lot more interestin AMD camps CPUs right no due to cost alone. But let’s face it, these are overpriced for gaming alone – if that’s all your doing, get a R5 1600/R7 1700 or i7 7700 as that’s still your best pics for pre gaming.
Well Intel might be late to the party – Ryzen Threadripper just got confirmed as a 16core/32thread part for unveiling at computex.
If AMD continues there aggressive pricing there will be no reason to consider an i9. i5 is already considered by gamers as being dead with only the i7 withstanding due to its sheer overclock performance.
Will probably be way out everyone’s price range for years, rather than selling it in a way so every one has one in their house. That just wouldn’t be good business, you guys know Microsoft logic.