Intel announces X-Series and more without details
Computex 2017: Marketing over everything esle
May 30, 2017 by Charlie Demerjian
“During the Intel Computex keynote they introduced multiple new product lines from SSDs to form factors, high-end X-Series to the ‘next gen’ Core. It sounded good but the details given out during the show were limited to the core counts of the X-Series, 12 and 18. The rest had zero, and we mean none, of the technical detail people actually care about.
Or at least it would be if you don’t look at the next few columns. Faced with enthusiasts who might actually understand what they are buying and not just plunk down 4-digit dollars for a slower part, Intel leapt into action and kneecapped the 6 and 8-core parts. How? They castrated the PCIe lanes to 28 vs the 44 on the bigger 10-core variants. Please note that the die in Xeon form has 48 PCIe3 lanes so even the 44 is a crippling.
Intel is saying in no uncertain terms that their highest end gaming part, the X which stands for Extreme series, can’t have a full bandwidth second GPU attached unless you but a $999 part! If you think the company cares one bit about their gaming customers, this should shatter those illusions. A high-end gamer part that can only support one GPU at full bandwidth? What can I say, this is so sad it isn’t worth mocking. Please note that AMD does not artificially cripple Ryzen in any way.
But just when you think things can’t get dumber we come to the 4-core variants, Kaby lake on Socket 2066. The ‘high’ end 7740X has 4-cores and 8-threads while the lesser 7640X has only 4-threads. Yup they killed HT because, well, there isn’t a good reason other than to jack buyers. They love the enthusiasts, really, they will say so. This is one of those situations your mother taught you about, watch what they do and not what they say.
Back to the point whomever greenlighted this Kaby-X line should be fired. Why? The Socket 2066 platform has 4 channel memory and up to 44 PCIe3 lanes. Kaby-X has two memory channels and 16 PCIe3 lanes. Motherboards support both so if you buy a Socket 2066 board and plug a Kaby-X into it, half your memory slots don’t work. 28/44ths of your PCIe channels are likewise MIA which means at least one slot will be dead, likely more. This is a recipe for returns and a very annoyed channel. Even if Intel sells through OEMs they will still have customers who see empty memory slots and go out and buy an upgrade only to find it doesn’t actually work. Kaby-X is not only a bad product it is a marketing disaster. And it is more expensive than just buying a non-X Kaby part. There is no upside to this turkey.
That brings us to the big parts, the 12/14/16/18-core variants. They are not only so awesome they transcend the i7 name and force an i9 badge but the top part is now an XE! Yes the i9-7960X was all that could be contained with an X suffix, the 18-core i9-7960XE was needed to convey the awesomeness of this $1999 turkey.
The specs on these new cores are not announced but in an earlier slide Intel says 140W and 160W parts so at least we know they increased the TDP to accommodate the HCC dies. Everything else is left blank as you can see above. And they are going to be shipping months after the i7-X parts. It is almost like AMD caught Intel with their pants down when they announced the 16-core Threadripper.
That would be a cynical interpretation however, fully backed up by the last set of Intel roadmaps released which did not have the 12+ core variants on it anywhere. What you can say about them is that the 12-18 core models will be slower, more expensive, and consume more energy than the 6-10 core models. There is no reason to buy these i9 models, they will be worse than the smaller parts in every way when gaming, and AMD’s Threadripper should crush them for far less money.”
Those are some harsh words from Charlie Demerjian about intel’s newest offering.
https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/30/intel-announces-x-series-without-details/