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Silicon wafer

Since information technology launched in early March, AMD's Ryzen 7 and Ryzen v families have blown holes in Intel's midrange and loftier-end desktop product segments. It was but a matter of time until Chipzilla retaliated, and a leaked slide from a High german presentation suggests that Intel is stepping upward its own Skylake-X HEDT (High Cease DeskTop) platforms.

According to the leaked information, Intel volition offer a top-finish 12-cadre Core i9-7920X, with 24 threads and 16.5MB of L3 cache, with 44 PCIe iii.0 lanes. Base clock and turbo frequencies are all TBD, but the chip supposedly has xvi.5MB of L3 cache. The other chips are listed every bit follows:

intelskylakex

Original forum post by Sweepr, image by dooon

Cadre i9-7900X: x cores, 20 threads, 3.3GHz base of operations, 4.3GHz Turbo, 4.5GHz Turbo Boost 3.0, thirteen.75MB of L3, 44 lanes of PCIe iii.0.

Core i9-7820X: 8 cores, 16 threads, three.6GHz base, 4.3GHz Turbo, 4.5GHz Turbo Boost 3.0, 11MB L3, 28 lanes of PCIe 3.0

Core i9-7800X: 6 cores, 12 threads, iii.5GHz base, 4GHz Turbo, no Turbo Heave 3.0, 8.25MB L3, 28 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

Core i7-7740K: 4 cores, viii threads, iv.3GHz base, 4.5GHz Turbo, no Turbo Heave 3.0, 8MB L3, 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

Cadre i7-7640K: four cores, 4 threads, 4GHz base of operations, 4.2GHz Turbo, no Turbo Boost three.0, 6MB of L3 cache, 16 lanes of PCIe iii.0.

The two Core i7 chips would be Kaby Lake-derived while the rest of the Core i9 family is based on Skylake-X.

No make clean match with existing Intel products

I'm non at all certain these leaks reverberate the chips Intel volition announce at Computex. Kickoff, there's the amount of L3 cache. These new cores have far less L3 cache than whatever current Intel HEDT chip — Intel'due south 10-core 6950X, for case, has 25MB of L3. For the last six years, all the fashion back to the 3960X, Intel has offered two-2.5MB of L3 cache per CPU cadre in the HEDT family unit. These new chips slash that ratio to one.375MB per core.

Sweepr, the Anandtech poster who leaked this data, claims that Intel has made upward for the sharp L3 deficit past quadrupling the size of its L2 cache. While nosotros've talked before well-nigh how Intel might respond to AMD's Ryzen, there'south no style Intel could have peradventure made this change in response. Increasing cache sizes without negatively impacting cache latency is a significant undertaking; Intel would have had to do a primal respin on Skylake to make this change. If these cache counts are accurate, they reverberate plans Intel made a year or more agone, not any recent response to a renewed competitive environs. And how effective (and how large) various caches need to be for optimal performance is partially a function of the cache architecture. Increasing the L2 enshroud by 768KB doesn't automatically compensate for shrinking the L3 cache.

If this leaked roadmap is truthful–and that'due south a big if–it implies Intel won't be fixing one of the artificial division barriers that's nearly annoyed enthusiasts: the lockout on PCI Express lanes. If y'all desire to run two graphics cards at full x16, yous accept to buy a 10-core chip to do it. Unless Intel plans to essentially slash prices, that would actually be a worse deal than at present. Currently, the Cadre i7-6850K supports twoscore PCI-Express lanes with an MSRP of $617 – $628. Intel's 10-cadre processor, the 6950X, is a $1,800 core. Unless Intel plans a serious price cutting at this core count, enthusiasts will have to pay meridian dollar for a 32-lane solution. Ryzen 7 doesn't currently offer a 32-lane solution either, though there'southward speculation that the company's rumored HEDT competitive solution will, when and if it'south released.

Finally, it's not clear why Intel would fifty-fifty bother releasing Core i7 CPUs with these specs. There's the tiniest hint of an upgrade in the i7-7740K, with its 4.3GHz base clock every bit opposed to the 4.2GHz base clock of the 7700K, but the Core i7-7640K isn't an i7 at all. It's zilch but an i5 with higher base clocks, and whatsoever 4-core / eight-thread i7 from the by few years will outperform it in whatever multi-threaded application of note. Releasing an entry-level HEDT "Core i7" that would assuredly exist outperformed by the Core i7-4790K, 6700K, or 7700K isn't the best style to encourage enthusiast adoption and I'thousand taking these rumors with a fair scrap of table salt.

At present read: How L1 and L2 CPU caches work, and why they're an essential part of modern chips