Intel Unwraps The Rest Of Its Core X-series CPU Family

[Guest]

Just in time for the much-anticipated reviews of AMD's Threadripper HEDT processors this Thursday, Intel is once again attempting to steal some of its competitor’s thunder by strategically unveiling the complete details of its high-end desktop CPU lineup.

Intel Unwraps The Rest Of Its Core X-series CPU Family : Read more

 

[anoldnewb]

Fanboy comments!#%&

 

[Kenneth_1984]

Competition. It's a good time to be a PC enthusiast.

 

[jimmysmitty]

The thing is the HEDT market covers a lot more than just gamers. There are professionals who buy Intel HEDT for workstation and production uses. That said, Intel has a name in that game right now while AMD has been mostly absent from the HEDT market for the past few years. Sure a few of the more loyal fans of AMD would buy it but the majority of workstations had either HEDT i7s or Xeons in them.

That is probably why Intel is setting the price.

Plus we have no real performance, thermal or power information on TR yet. For all we know the performance could be OK with horrible thermals. Or it could be excellent with mind blowing thermals. Until then, Intel will attempt to make more money. Intel probably has plenty of wiggle room to drop pricing if need be while I would assume AMD does not have nearly as much.

 

[InvalidError]

The thing is the HEDT market covers a lot more than just gamers.

HEDT is mostly useless for gamers when OC'd i7 beat HEDT chips in most games for a fraction of the cost. Unless you have unlimited disposable income, you need to use your PC for more than just gaming to justify the steep expense.

 

[atomicWAR]

@ invaliderror

As a HEDT gamer I would have to mostly agree but I do also believe there is a decent market share there. I don't only game. I do a fair bit of video encode/decode as well. So I have some more reasons then some gamers to make the leap. I think you're right most gamers don't need that kind of set-up but the dynamics of "What a gamer is" has changed as well. A fair chunk of the HEDT audience probably started as a gamer before they got immersed in their professional/prosumer workloads. And when you take the fact game streaming has grown a lot in popularity as has youtube/video editing you get a decent population of folks who could use more cores who game as well. Your not wrong for a lot of these users 8C/16T is enough on the AMD space which price wise is high end mainstream but Intel is charging just enough more to really make it a HEDT part for the same core counts. I mean i am sitting on wanting to build this whole year. I may wait for next gen as my i7 3930K @4.2ghz with 2 GTX 1080s is fine for 4K though my wife uses my the old parts when I upgrade so I don't want to wait to long either or I'll be shelling out for 2 rigs. Her i7 970 @4ghz had a great run and still works fine for 60hz gaming on 1080P seeing how we both crank up the filtering and AA (16x by 8x) with as high as we can go with the everything else while maintaining that 16x by 8x (4x in a pinch). So for now the GPUs still end up being the bottlenecks. I am looking at the i7 7900x and the Threadripper 1920x as potential upgrade paths. Basically waiting on the price war that should ensue when Threadripper hits the streets. Point being there are certainly users like myself out there who will find HEDT parts useful in gaming.

 

[TheTechGen]

i9-7900X for $999? Really, yeah sorry Intel, but I am going with threadripper. Good luck with the price gouging as if you thought your monopoly would continue.

 

[TechyInAZ]

@ invaliderror

As a HEDT gamer I would have to mostly agree but I do also believe there is a decent market share there. I don't only game. I do a fair bit of video encode/decode as well. So I have some more reasons then some gamers to make the leap. I think you're right most gamers don't need that kind of set-up but the dynamics of "What a gamer is" has changed as well. A fair chunk of the HEDT audience probably started as a gamer before they got immersed in their professional/prosumer workloads. And when you take the fact game streaming has grown a lot in popularity as has youtube/video editing you get a decent population of folks who could use more cores who game as well. Your not wrong for a lot of these users 8C/16T is enough on the AMD space which price wise is high end mainstream but Intel is charging just enough more to really make it a HEDT part for the same core counts. I mean i am sitting on wanting to build this whole year. I may wait for next gen as my i7 3930K @4.2ghz with 2 GTX 1080s is fine for 4K though my wife uses my the old parts when I upgrade so I don't want to wait to long either or I'll be shelling out for 2 rigs. Her i7 970 @4ghz had a great run and still works fine for 60hz gaming on 1080P seeing how we both crank up the filtering and AA (16x by 8x) with as high as we can go with the everything else while maintaining that 16x by 8x (4x in a pinch). So for now the GPUs still end up being the bottlenecks. I am looking at the i7 7900x and the Threadripper 1920x as potential upgrade paths. Basically waiting on the price war that should ensue when Threadripper hits the streets. Point being there are certainly users like myself out there who will find HEDT parts useful in gaming.

Yeah it just depends on what your needs are. Simple as that. Also can't forget power users (which I am one), who are PC enthusiasts and find ways to use all that power no matter what (for fun basically). It's sort of the reason why i got the Ryzen 7 1700X over a Ryzen 5 1600X (which would be plenty good for me), I wanted to play around with high end hardware. (But I only say sorta because I'm also using my PC for video encoding for youtube stuff (productive youtube aswell not just casual game streaming).)

 

[kinggremlin]

i9-7900X for $999? Really, yeah sorry Intel, but I am going with threadripper. Good luck with the price gouging as if you thought your monopoly would continue.

Unless you're a purchasing agent for a Fortune 500 company, Intel doesn't care what you think. The old axiom was, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." You can basically replace that with Intel today. Every generation, Intel has OEM Xeon's that sell for 6,7 even $8000 or more. If companies are willing to shell out that much, how much do you think they care about spending a few hundred dollars more for an Intel CPU they have a history with and trust?

There isn't going to be a price war, because Intel would rather maintain their high margins at the expense of losing a slight bit of market share. Even if it isn't true, maintaining a higher selling price gives the impression they are selling a higher quality product, while getting into a price war tells customers that Intel has no confidence in their own products.

 

[englandr753]

"What does all this mean? Simply put, end users faced with a platform upgrade could buy an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X processor, a new TR4 motherboard, and a high-end graphics card for the same price as a single i9-7980XE processor."

For the top 2% that have deep pockets, Intel may have the top tier still cornered, provided their product actually outperforms threadripper. I think Intels blue panties are still getting dug out of their marketing departments butts from AMD's sneak attack with Ryzen and threadripper.

As for me and my house, I'll take that new shiny motherboard, high end video card and new threadripper cpu.

 

[jasonf2]

I like intel products but pushing the $2000 envelope is insane for a consumer product. I understand that they are trying to protect their xeon margins but nothing performance wise here is going to justify the price tag in consumer workloads. A $1000 chip is crazy enough. Intel's biggest problem here though is going to be AMDs lower end threadrippers. The PCI lane count alone is going to make serious headway into Intel's lower price higher volume -X chips which were your prosumer go to for custom builders. Less than ideal IPC and thermal clocking constraints made the PCI lane count the only advantage for -X Chips. Threadripper blows intel out of the water here especially compared with the lower end -x chips. Intel apparently doesn't remember what competition is. Instead they continue to increase price in a marketplace where they continue to struggle to prove a value in the first place. If they can't pull something truly magical out of their R&D skunkworks they will have to start competing on price. That is something they haven't had to do in a very long time.

 

[shiitaki]

The thing with hardware is that who cares if the software support isn't there? Surprisingly, while it is called the AMD64 instruction set, Intel enjoys superior support that doesn't exist for AMDs new platform.

The Enterprise/Professional workload is what Intel is targeting, and a lower price is nice, but not as nice as certainty. You don't want to buy a bunch of new machines just fine out weeks later you have an incompatibility somewhere. The IPC on a single core is irrelevant if you are looking at a CPU with so many threads. Interestingly thought, we are back to the point where AMD will be bought by gamers and Intel by corporations, when the AMD is better for business and Intel for games! AMD needs to step up and contribute to Open Source in a big way to support all of this hardware, aggressively so that those that try it don't fail and leave AMD with another generation of haters.

If it has to work, you go with what you know.

I really wish AMD enjoyed the market share it deserved during the Pentium 4 years, which Intel did not pay enough in my opinion. This time I hope AMD gains some market share, I also think this is an industry that has matured. There are not going to be large jumps in IPC or clocks anymore.

We are reaching a point where CPUs are becoming a commodity, so Intel is not going to be putting AMD in the rear view mirror again. They will simply be optimizing going forward, narrowing the gap between blue and green.

Glad to see AMD catch up, we should have 3 or 4 choices, but at least it is not one. I want to buy an AMD cpu just to frame and put on the wall in support of the green team. I was hoping Apple was migrating to AMD cpus. I think what is intriguing is that with 4K pins, there could be a Threadripper CPU with 2 sub dies CPU, 2 sub dies GPU!

The CPU industry is interesting again!

 

[drajitsh]

King gremlin, I would love to disagree with you but if history holds, you are probably correct
Remember, in the p4 /opteron generation, AMD had the superior processor on all counts but the sales still went to intel.

 

[drajitsh]

Considering the power & thermal issues with 140W cpu's that were demonstrated here, I'm going to wait for a good review before I start planning.
Does anyone know whether intel uses paste on XEON-SP also?

 

[serioussamik17]

The 7900X seems to be good choice from all computing intents and purposes. For enthusiast gaming rigs, it hits a sweet spot. I wish Intel trims the pricing by $100-150 down the road, and it would a tantalizing proposition for my much awaited upgrade this fall.

 

[mapesdhs]

The 7900X seems to be good choice from all computing intents and purposes. ...

Not by a long way. For those tasks which need significant GPU and I/O expansion, TR is a far more attractive proposition.

Ian.

 

[Vaesmannaeyjar]

It's weird seeing people talking about thermals all the time. That's *never* been a factor when I bought a platform. Noise, yes. Getting a good enough cooling system, yes. thermals and electricity consumption ? Really ? We're talking a difference of a few bucks per year at worst.

 

[JamesSneed]

It's weird seeing people talking about thermals all the time. That's *never* been a factor when I bought a platform. Noise, yes. Getting a good enough cooling system, yes. thermals and electricity consumption ? Really ? We're talking a difference of a few bucks per year at worst.

Thermals matter especially when you get into high core counts. When you get into high core counts thermals impede the frequency much faster so better thermals the higher the frequency the CPU can run which leads to higher performance. This matters less on lower crore counts as you rarely push a CPU to thermal limits of what can be cooled by traditional methods but on high core counts they are already close to those limits at stock. Point in hand Intel's 16 core CPU has a base clock of 2.8Ghz and AMD 16 core has a base clock of 3.4Ghz this is directly related to thermals.

 

[JamesSneed]

The 7900X seems to be good choice from all computing intents and purposes. ...

Not by a long way. For those tasks which need significant GPU and I/O expansion, TR is a far more attractive proposition.

Ian.

Yeah and lets not forget for the same money you get a TR 16 core vs the 10 core 7900x. I will wait for reviews to really comment here but I suspect this value proposition that the 7900x is said to have, will go away for a large group of people that are more concerned with the multi-threaded performance.

 

[zippyzion]

Wow... look at those clock rates drop as the TDP and core count rises. Intel KNOWS they have a heat issue, one has to wonder if they even plan on fixing it in this gen product.

The turbo boost clocks look good, but that is only on 2 or 1 core. It will make lightly threaded and single thread applications look good, but I REALLY wonder if the 18 core can keep up with Threadripper in the heavily threaded programs. We are talking about a base clock speed advantage of 1GHz here with IPC that only lags slightly behind. Those 2 extra cores/4 extra threads should theoretically make up for it, but performance should be close given what we've seen of Zen and Skylake X so far.

This is so exciting!

 

[Altherix]

I'm going to bet the 7980XE won't be twice the performance of the 1950X even though it's twice the price.

Line up just stinks of rushed out the door. If you're smart you'll wait for the next iteration of CPUs from Intel when they do it properly. Or, you'll go with a Threadripper if you need something now.

 

[dark_lord69]

Well at least the i5 has a reasonable price.
Newegg currently has the i5 7600K at $239.99
According to this list the 7640X is at $242

So, yeah, I'd pay the extra 2 dollars for the extreme edition.
But the more expensive motherboards are where this value jumps out the window.

 

[drwho1]

I7-7800X appear to be the best price-performance of this lineup.

 

[mapesdhs]

I7-7800X appear to be the best price-performance of this lineup.

Of Intel's offerings perhaps, but for gaming, better off with a Ryzen 1700, much cheaper mbd, much better GPU. For gaming, Intel's IPC advantage vanishes if the platform cost total is so much less with AMD that it allows for a far better GPU in the first instance.

Intel might not look so bad with all this if it weren't for the borked chipset features, caveats, thermals, etc. AM4 and TR just look like cleaner, smarter platforms atm.

Have to say I'm surprised that some seems so surprised Intel has ended up like this, many have been predicting this could or would happen for at least two years.

Ian.

 

[InvalidError]

Wow... look at those clock rates drop as the TDP and core count rises. Intel KNOWS they have a heat issue, one has to wonder if they even plan on fixing it in this gen product.

There is no miracle cure to a buttload of transistors switching at 4+GHz dissipating lots of power/heat. The only things Intel and AMD can do about it is take advantage of process tweaks and die shrinks whenever available.

Four times the core count for twice the power is still impressive power-efficiency.