Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Intel Launches 16 and 18-Core Core i9 Desktop Chips To Take On AMD Threadripper (hothardware.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the more-the-merrier dept.

MojoKid writes: Intel has officially launched its Skylake-X processor offering in response to AMD's Ryzen Threadripper series of desktop CPUs. The new Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X are 18 and 16-core configurations respectively, with 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz base clocks and 4.4GHz max boost clocks. Both chips support Intel HyperThreading, with 36 threads of processing for the 7980XE and 32 for the 7960X, while both also have 44 lanes of PCI Express connectivity and support for DDR4-2666MHz memory. Both chips also utilize Intel's X299 chipset platform and are LGA 2066 socket compatible. The Core i9-7980XE has 24.75MB of shared L3 cache, 1MB of L2 cache per core, and a TDP of 165W. The Core i9-7960X's details are essentially same, though two processor cores and the cache associated with them have been lopped off. The Core i9-7960X has a couple of advantages, however, in that its base clock is 200MHz higher than the flagship Core i9-7980XE and it has higher all-core frequency boost to 3.6GHz, while the 7908XE tops out at 3.4GHz on all cores. The new chips are multi-threaded beasts in the benchmarks, posting the highest scores seen to date in heavily threaded workloads. They also offer strong single-threaded performance that outpaces AMD's Ryzen processors. Power consumption is surprisingly good as well and only marginally higher than the 10-core Core i9-7900X. However, at $1999 for the Core i9-7980XE and $1699 for the Core i9-7960X, as usual with Intel high-end chips, they're certainly not cheap.

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Too little too late by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sorry Intel, the new AMD procs offer great performance for the money. No reason to go Intel for at least a generation.

    1. Re:Too little too late by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There are other advantages to AMD parts too. More PCIe lanes, better chipsets especially if you want to do virtualization with IOMMU pass-through, longer expected lifespan of the socket and motherboard, and a less terrible secret backdoor system.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. 165W by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 5, Interesting
    That's way hotter than the worst Pentium IV.

    "Power consumption is surprisingly good". I wouldn't like to see the power bill at the end of the month and what sort of passive cooling is used to achieve a quiet workspace?

    I can see why the review website is called Hot Hardware.

  3. Re:Hooray! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm not privy to Intel's cryptic market segmentation schemes; but I'd imagine that it is because they now have competition. As long as AMD was basically irrelevant; "High end" could pretty much mean what Intel wanted it to: either the point on the i7 price performance curve where 'price' really starts to overshadow 'performance' or the end of the Xeon range with low core counts somewhat limited cache and total system RAM support; at their preference.

    Now that AMD has some actually interesting parts again; Intel has less freedom to just call things "High end". Because AMD still lags on single threaded performance, they do have an "is a really fast i7 for extra money" option(the i7-7740x, only 4 cores and limited RAM support; but very, very, aggressive clock speed) and the slightly baffling i57640x(pay a nontrivial premium for an LGA2066 motherboard why exactly?); but because AMD is dishing out the core counts, PCIe lanes, and RAM capacities; they also have the i9s; which are painfully expensive by desktop standards; but look like awfully tempting budget Xeons unless something can be done about that.

    ECC makes a pretty good 'something'. Lasering off virtulization support would go quite badly(making them effectively useless to anyone who spins up even the occasional VM, which is a fair number of people who buy $1000+ CPUs; but probably also being a massive bargain for people who don't plan to virtualize their workstation or server workloads, which is still a lot of units). Disabling AMT wouldn't be effective enough: gamer/enthusiast types wouldn't care; but neither would a lot of workstation or server customers(either all your computers are in one place, so fancy remote access tools aren't interesting; or you can just add an AST2400 or something if Intel tries to charge too much). Gimping core counts or PCIe lanes isn't an option because AMD; which pretty much leaves ECC.