Last week, a member of Anandtech forums, leaked what appears to be a new series of processors by Intel. The Intel Core i9, or Intel Core X Series as the slide says, includes six CPUs of two generations, and they will reportedly launch this June.
According to the forum discussion, these new processors will be unveiled at COMPUTEX Taipei 2017 in Taiwan at the end of the month. The chips would be aimed at the high-end performance market, and the specifications they offer will likely bring prohibitively high prices with them.
The new lineup is set to rival AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 9 “Threadripper” CPUs, which will feature similar specifications at potentially lower prices. These will also launch in June, reports say, and they will target the same market segment as Intel’s latest products.
What we know about the new Kaby Lake chips
Intel’s new Core i9 lineup will start things off with four units: the i9-7800X, the i9-7820X, the i9-7900x, and the i9-7920X, the most powerful of them all. There are also two Kaby Lake CPUs in the works, the i7-7740X and the i7-7640X.
Let’s start from the bottom up. These new offerings of the i7 Core lineup will fall under the Kaby Lake-X category, and they will deliver enhanced performance for a hefty premium, according to reports.
The i7-7640X will be a quad-core processor with four threads, 6 MB of onboard L3 cache memory, 16 PCIe lanes, and dual DDR4-2666 RAM. It will clock at 4.0 GHz normally and 4.2 GHz when boosted.
Intel’s i7-7740X steps up the game a little as a quad-core chip with double the threads of its little brother, along the same lane count and RAM. This unit, however, will have a base clock rate of 4.3 GHz and it will make a 0.2 GHz jump when user step on the Turbo 2.0.
Both of these CPUs will reach 112W TDP, which is hot but not as much as the reported 140W of the Skylake-X units. Some leaks say they could go up to 160W, which is a bit worrisome without some serious cooling mechanism.
Intel Core i9 processors: Specs and release date
The first of these products is the hexacore i9-7800X, packing 8.25 MB of L3 cache and quad DDR4-2666 RAM. It has twelve threads and 28 PCIe lanes, as well as a base clock speed of 3.5 GHz that can go up to 4.0 in Turbo mode.
Next up there is the i9-7820X, an octa-core processor with threads that double its core count, 11 MB of cache, the same PCIe lanes as the 7800-X, and the same RAM configuration as the rest of the lineup. Its clock starts ticking at 4.3 GHz and it stops at 4.5 GHz after overclock.
The i9-7900X takes things up one more notch at 10 cores and 20 threads, 44 PCIe lanes, the same 4x RAM setup and 13.75 of L3 cache. Base clock on this CPU is 3.3 GHz and it supports Turbo 2.0 and Turbo 3.0, taking performance to a maximum 4.5 GHz.
Finally, the Intel Core i9-7920X is at the top with 12 cores and twice as many threads. No word on clock speed, base nor boosted, but it has 16.3 MB allocated for cache and it is rumored to be the one unit to reach 160W levels of heat.
COMPUTEX Taipei takes place this year from May 30 to June 3, and Intel is rumored to unveil the new processor series at the event with availability following that same month. The Core i9-7920X, however, is slated for an August release.
Source: Anandtech
