Meet thie Intel Skylake-X Processor Family

Tuesday 30 May 2017

Meet thie Intel Skylake-X Processor Family

Vishvesh Mishra News No comments

With the consumer CPU market heating up after the recent announcement of AMD's Threadripper which is led by a 16C/32T beast, Intel finally came out with an answer in form of its new Skylake-X CPU lineup with the Intel Core i9-7980XE a 18C/36T monster leading the pack and costing in at a whooping $2000.
All these new SKUs would run on the new X299 PCH and LGA 2066 socket type so a new motherboard would be evident. But since not everyone is a richie rich who can afford the $2000 core i9-7980X Intel did introduce a cheaper lineup of processor which are expected to be followed up by Intel core i5 variants aswell. So below I'll break down whatever we know of so far regarding this.
The prices and core/thread counts are as follows:

Core i9-7980XE: 18-core/36-thread, $1,999
Core i9-7960X: 16-core/32-thread, $1,699
Core i9-7940X: 14-core/28-thread, $1,399
Core i9-7920X: 12-core/24-threads, $1,199
Core i9-7900X (3.3GHz): 10-core/20-thread, $999

For enthusiasts with tighter budgets, Intel will also sell three new Core i7 X-series chips:

Core i7 7820X (3.6GHZ), 8-core/16-thread, $599
Core i7-7800X (3.5GHz), 6-core/12-thread, $389
Core i7-7740X (4.3GHz), 4-core/8-thread, $339

All of the new chips are based upon what Intel calls “Skylake-X,” except the i7-7740X, which is designed around the Kaby Lake core.

One of the more interesting features of the new chips is what Intel calls an updated Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0. (They apparently ran out of adjectives to describe it.) As Gordon Mah Ung showed in his review of Intel’s Broadwell-E chips, Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 identified one “best core” among all of the available models, varying from chip to chip. The chip could then bind CPU-intensive single-threaded applications to that one core, improving the overall performance.

The updated version of Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 identifies two “best cores,” and again assigns the most CPU-intensive threads to them. It’s a nod to games and applications that are better at taking advantage of more cores. Not every chip incorporates the new feature, though, including the new six-core and the two quad-core X-series chips.

Here’s Intel’s summary of (some of the) new speeds and feeds, below.