Intel Announces New Core X-Series, Including 18-Core i9 CPU

Intel core i9 – At Computex past year, Intel unveiled its first 10-core consumer CPU, the company’s move into the world of a “mega-tasking”. After a number of rumours and leaks, Intel has finally made the Core X PC processors, along with the improved Core i5 and Core i7 processors and the mighty 18-core Core i9 processor.

There is no word on when these new chips will be released to the public, but reports show that Intel has said that the new chips have a 30% performance boost over previous generations.

As AnandTech notes, AMD is playing up this gap between its and Intel’s high-end desktop chips, given that all 64 lanes will be enabled for all ThreadRipper SKUs, while none of Intel’s new Core X-series below the $1000 Core i9 has all 44 lanes enabled.

If that extreme price is putting you off, the Core i9 Extreme line is also available in cheaper 16, 14, 12, and 10-core versions.

All of the i9 chips feature base clock speeds of 3.3GHz, reaching up to 4.3GHz dual-core speeds with Turbo Boost 2.0 and 4.5GHz with Turbo Boost 3.0. The i7 series spans four, six, and eight cores with hyperthreading, while the i5 series has a lone four-core, sans hyperthreading. It is clocked at 4.0GHz base speed and can be boosted up to 4.2 GHz.

The market for the chip is likely to be small in the near-term, because most PC users have no need for the power that the Core i9 Extreme Edition offers.

More interesting than the revamped Kaby Lake processors are Intel’s new i9 line which will feature powerful specs with price tags to match. While the Intel Core i9 processor will come in four models excluding the Extreme edition.

Chips in the Core X-Series will offer up to 18 processor cores and 36 threads, scaling the x86 processor lineup to new heights. Core i9 7980XE is expected to be Intel’s flagship model of Core X series.

At the low end of the spectrum are the new Kaby Lake-X processors called the i5-7640X and the i7-7740X, and they’re similar to the current Kaby Lake processors that were released this year and designed for the mainstream. We don’t have an official measurement from AMD, but it appears to be substantially larger than Intel’s 18-core top-end Core i9 processor. On a single processor core, many games still rely heavily as we’ve pointed out previously.