Intel Announces 18-Core i9 CPU Specs Ahead of AMD Threadripper Launch

At Computex 2017, Intel announced that its new Core i9 family would add significantly more cores than the old Core i7 HEDT CPU families had ever offered, while pushing back the window on availability for these high core-count CPUs into the fall. Now we know when these updated chips will hit market, and Intel has pulled the dates in from even the October launches we expected earlier this summer.

The 12-core Intel Core i9-7920X will be available starting on August 28, while the Core i9-7940X, 7960X, and 7980XE will all go on sale September 25. Pricing, frequencies, and core counts are shown below:

All of these new chips are based on the same Skylake-X refresh with a diminished amount of L3, but significantly more L2 per CPU core. We discussed some of the performance differences between the new Xeon design and older CPUs in an article last month; we’ll be revisiting comparisons in consumer markets in the very near future. There aren’t many surprises in Intel’s positioning, though we’d caution against making too much of the company’s listed Turbo Boost frequencies. Here’s why: All of those frequencies reflect the chip’s maximum dual-core frequency, and, given this, aren’t really a representative look at what to expect from the Core X-Series under load.

As CPU core counts scale up it becomes harder and harder to find workloads that can take advantage of all cores. Similarly, most workloads are at least capable of loading two or more threads these days. But this means that it’s the speeds and feeds in the in-between spaces between maximum dual-core clock and base clock that matter the most for overall performance.

Unlike the Skylake-X chips Intel has launched to-date, these new cores are based on the company’s HCC Xeon silicon. That last bit requires a bit of unpacking, so I’ll explain.

LCC, HCC, and XCC

Intel internally subdivides its Xeon processor families into three groups depending on which silicon they are based on. LCC chips are Low Core Count CPUs, with a contiguous L3 cache “wrapped” by CPU cores. These designs use a single ring bus for the L3, while the next highest CPU tier (High Core Count) typically uses a dual ring bus. Above this tier we have Extreme Core Count CPUs, but those aren’t in play here.

To-date, all of the Core X chips we’ve seen and the HEDT chips that preceded them were LCC processors. With the launch of its 12-core part, Intel is bringing HCC silicon to its LGA 2066 HEDT platform and (hopefully) a return to soldered die. We have a question in to Intel on this point, but it’s hard to see how the company can avoid it. Overclocking and thermal tests have shown the existing 10-core Skylake-X parts trap huge amounts of heat below the heat spreader and can nearly hit their thermal limits at stock clocks, much less when overclocked. Intel can compensate for rising core counts by stepping back its base and boost clocks, but at a certain point the heat that’s currently getting stuck underneath thermal paste needs to get off the core.

Intel is still pricing these cores substantially above what AMD delivers on a per-core basis, with $1,999 buying an 18-core Intel chip compared with the Threadripper 1950X, which will deliver 16 cores at $999. As for how they’ll perform in comparison to one another, we’ll have to wait and see.