Intel launches powerful Core i9 processor

Intel launches powerful Core i9 processor

 Intel’s Core i9 processor is what happens when Intel begins to worry that it might not have the baldest chip on the block. If you’re desperate to know how it performs against AMD’s Threadripper , you’re in luck—as of Sept. 25, we’ve tested the 18-core Core i9-7980X and the 16-core Core i9-7960XE. Read on for the speeds, feeds, prices, and reviews of the new Core i9 chips, as well as all the details we have on the underlying technologies. In addition to the new Core i9 specs, we now know how the Core i9 performs as part of our review, and the price and availability of X299 motherboards. We’ll update this post with new information and testing as we receive it. The processor specs that matter most concern performance. The raw clock speed determines how fast any one thread can be acted upon, while the core and thread counts control how many threads or tasks can be calculated in parallel. The Core i9 series excels in these metrics. But you’ll pay a hefty premium for that talent.

Finally, Intel has announced all of the clock speeds of the Core i9 family. They’re all unlocked, too—ready and waiting to be overclocked. Here’s a summary of the core counts and prices of the Core i9 chips we do know, including clock speeds where available.

Core i9 Extreme Edition:-Core i9-7980XE: (2.6GHz, 4.4GHz burst) 18 cores/36

As expensive as they are, however, the Core i9s are popular chips. The Core i9-7940X, i9-7960X and i9-7980XE are all listed as back ordered or out of stock at popular retailer Newegg. (According to Newegg, the retailer will receive more stock of the Core i9-7940X sometime between Oct. 4 and Oct. 10. As for the 7960X and 7980XE, there's no word.) It looks like the 12-core 7920X is the fastest, widely-available Core i9 at the moment. You were able to preorder the Core i7 X-series chips and the 10-core Core i9-7900X the week of June 20. The 12-core Core i9-7920X ships August 28 while the 14-, 16-, and 18-core Core i9 chips shipped on September 25. The new chips will consume 112W or 140W (depending on the chip), requiring a liquid-cooling solution. Intel has said there will be a 165W chip, too, but waited until early August to reveal it—or them, as it turns out. Intel will have three 165-watt chips: the i9-7980XE, the i9-7960X, and the i9-7940X. We tested the Core i9’s power consumption deep within our Core i9 review, and found that it consumes more power than the Threadripper, incidentally.

More importantly, all of the Core i9 chps use a new Socket R4, a 2,066-pin LG socket that will require a brand-new motherboard. Intel’s Core i9 family is not backward-compatible with existing Sky-lake or Kaby Lake motherboards.

New features

Overclocking options

Intel’s Core i9 is tailor-made for overclocking, as the entire family comes unlocked. Intel doesn’t recommend that you cool a Core i9 chip with air alone, though, so a straight fan-based solution is out. Instead, Intel recommends its own TS13X liquid-cooling solution, which will be sold separately. You can also buy your own third-party cooling solutions, as long as it’s rated for the TS13X. The TS13X uses a solution of propylene glycol to pump the heat to a 73.84-CFM fan that generates between 21 and 35 DBA, rotating between 800rpm and 2,200rpm. 

Intel will maintain support for per-core overclocking and per-core voltage adjustments, using its own Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU). New controllable features for overclocking include AVX 512 ratio offsets, trim voltage control of the memory control, and PEG/DMI overclocking. Intel will also offer what it calls its “performance tuning protection plan,” a sort of insurance policy for overclockers. It’s a one-strike policy: The Company will let you fry your chip once, just once, and send you a replacement. 

Core i9/X299 motherboards

Remember that for now, every Core i9 motherboard you’ll buy is based on the Socket R4, a 2,066-pin LGA socket that’s incompatible with some of the older Core i5 and Core i7 microprocessors. (The Core i5-7640X, Core i7-7740X, Core i7-7800X, and Core i7-7820X all use the new 2,066-pin socket, too.) All of the new motherboards are based on Intel’s X299 chip-set, the only chip-set for the Intel Core i9 right now.

Intel X299 chip-set

Right now, there’s but a single chipset to accompany the Core i9: the X299. As mentioned above, the new chipset uses Socket R4, a 2,066-pin LGA socket that will require a brand-new motherboard. Intel’s Core i9 family is not backward-compatible with existing Skylake or Kaby Lake motherboards. Some of Intel’s cheaper chips can only take advantage of a subset of these, though. The Core i7-7800X (6 cores, 12 threads) and Core i7-7820X (8 cores, 16 threads) rest on an intermediary rung where only 28 PCIe lanes total are available.

Why we should buy Core i9

In addition to just the raw performance, the Core i9 family includes something new. In its earlier Broad-well-E chips, Intel included something called Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0, which identified one “best core” among all of the available cores on a chip. If and when the chip needed to be boosted, that best core would be the one selected to be dynamically overclocked. The new feature within most of the Core i9 chips is what Intel calls an updated Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0,  where the chip identifies not just one, but two cores as the best cores.  

competition: AMD’s Threadripper

For much of the last decade, Intel dominated high-end PC computing, and rival AMD struggled to keep up. That’s changing. AMD debuted its Ryzen processor to global acclaim, though the company’s performance claims-came under some scrutiny. More recently, the company came out with its own version of the Core i9: Threadripper. Right now, Threadripper lags slightly behind Core i9 in core count: 16 cores, 32 threads, compared to the Core i9-7980XL’s 18 cores and 36 threads. AMD’s traditional lever, though, is price. While Intel is asking enthusiasts to pay through the nose for Core i9 chips, AMD’s Threadripper comes at an enormous discount.                  Intel launches powerful Core i9 processor