Intel said Wednesday that it plans to ship two high-end desktop processors next month: both its monstrous Core i9-9900KS processor and its upcoming Cascade Lake-X gaming processor will go on sale.
In a presentation from the IFA show in Berlin, Ryan Shrout, chief performance strategist at Intel, said that Intel is aware of the competition, specifically AMD and Qualcomm, and was “adjusting” to deliver market-leading products. AMD has already delivered a cost-competitive Ryzen processor, and there’s reason to believe a next-gen Threadripper is coming soon. As Intel did at Computex, the chipmaker announced furture products in hopes of taking some wind out of its competitor’s sales.
Intel
Intel also took a shot at Qualcomm, whose upcoming 8cx chip is said to about equal a Core i5. Intel tried to establish exactly which Core i5 was being referenced—the older Whiskey Lake—and how its latest 10th-gen “Comet Lake” (CML) parts would shape up.
Intel had already announced the Core i9-9900KS at Computex, a 4GHz, 8-core/16-thread chip that boosts to 5GHz—and, more importantly, across all cores simultaneously. That gave Shrout the opportunity to point out that rival AMD had been caught out with 3rd-gen Ryzen chips that underperformed the company’s boost claims, which AMD blamed on a bug that the company will fix.
It’s not clear what the Core i9-9900KS TDP will be, however, and Intel didn’t offer any further details along those lines. We still don’t know the price either, although it’s likely to be somewhere north of exorbitant.
Shrout positioned the products as direct responses to its rivals. “The point is, we’re not taking this sitting down, we see the competition, we see the landscape as it is,” Shrout said. “We’re adjusting because we take these customers very seriously. And we want to give them the best product possible.”
Probably the more direct attack against AMD’s Threadripper, however, will be the upcoming Cascade Lake-X desktop chip, which Shrout said would ship in October. If you recall the massive 18-core Core i9-7980X and 16-core Core i9-7960X that shipped in 2017, they actually outperformed AMD’s Threadripper, but at a dramatically higher price.
Intel was at least honest about how the older Skylake-X architecture that formed the foundation of the Core i9-7980X shaped up to Threadripper:
Intel
During its presentation at IFA 2019 in Berlin, Intel showed the performance per dollar of Skylake-X vs. AMD Threadripper and the upcoming Cascade Lake-X, admitting that Skylake-X was overpriced for what you got.
Unfortunately, Intel refused to answer any and all further questions about the Core i9-9900KS, as well as the upcoming Cascade Lake-X chip. But based on Intel’s timing, we can probably assume that we’ll be seeing a lot of top-tier PC chip news next month, from both Intel and AMD.