Intel's next generation of ultra-performance processors appear to have leaked, with an all-new brand and some ridiculously high-end parts revealed. Here's everything we know so far about Intel Core i9, including all the latest price, spec and release date rumours.
Intel's next-generation workstation CPUs will be called Intel Core i9, finally ending the confusion of there being far too many Core i7 chips on the market.
There will be four new Intel Core i9 chips, all of which will feature six or more cores, with the top-end i9-7920X apparently getting a whopping 12 cores – the most ever for an Intel desktop part (though Intel's server-grade Xeon chips go beyond 12 cores).
In terms of where Core i9 will sit within Intel's consumer CPU family, it's positioned to take the place of the firm's existing 'Extreme' line, which are for high-end rigs used for content creation, including video production and game development.
The information comes from a post in the Anandtech forums, where a rather unscrupulous member appears to have taken a photo of an Intel presentation.
The cheaper chips, which will have six and eight cores, will rival AMD's top-end Ryzen processors, featuring higher clock speeds and support for more PCIe lanes – both of which are important for high-end PCs that pack powerful components, like multiple graphics cards and high-speed storage arrays.
The most expensive are (on paper, at least) in a class of their own, with the Core i9-7900X getting 10 hyper-threaded (each core can be used as two processing threads) cores, and the top-end i9-7920X gets 12 cores for a total of 24 threads. For context, the current most-expensive Intel Extreme chip is the Core i7-5960X, which costs nearly £1600. Expect the top-end models listed here to cost even more.
That top-end chip also enjoy a massive 16.5MB of L3 cache, the ultra high-speed memory which CPU cores have most immediate access to. That's more than double Intel's most powerful current consumer chip, the i7-7700K, which gets 8MB of cache. All the chips will be built to a similar 14nm (nanometre) design similar to the sixth-generation Skylake processors.
The key specs for the rumoured new chips are as follows.
Core i9-7800X Core i9-7820X Core i9-7900X Core i9-7920X Cores/Threads 6/12 8/16 10/20 12/24 Base clock (GHz) 3.5GHz 3.6GHz 3.3GHz Unknown Boost clock (GHz) 4GHz 4.5GHz 4.5GHz Unknown L3 cache (MB) 8.25 11MB 13.75 16.5 TDP 140W 140W 160W 160W
The platform appears to be codenamed 'Basin Falls', while compatible motherboards will be called X299. It should support up to 44 PCIe lanes, which is a lot, along with 10 USB 3.0 ports and eight SATA connectors. Quad-channel memory will also be supported.
We're expecting Intel to unveil Core i9 at Computex 2017 in Taipei at the end of the month.
