At one of the most exciting announcements of the year, Intel unveiled today a new processor series which includes a beastly 18-core, 8th generation CPU.
The Skylake-X Core i9 is the first processor in history that features 18 cores and 36 threads, beating AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 9 Threadripper which will come out with 16 cores.
Intel announced the news today at Computex 2017 in Taipei, presenting a big series of chips that start at $242 and cost up to $2.000. The company’s new processor platform is called X299 and comes to replace X99, having a wider range.
All processors come with up to 44 PCIe lanes and support for Intel Optane memory.
Here are the prices and speeds that are available so far:
30% performance boost
In the announcement event, Intel said that these 8th-gen processors offer 30% performance improvement over its current 7th-gen CPUs. Corporate vice president of Intel, Gregory Bryant, said on Tuesday that the CPUs will also be 10% faster for multi-thread performance.
According to Intel, virtual reality and gaming will benefit hugely from these new processors. Concerning gamers, Intel promised today that streamers will see the quality of their streaming further improve.
At the launch, the company demoed a PC running on a Core X-Series processor that was streaming live someone playing a VR game on Twitch. The PC was able to broadcast a number of different views and angles of gameplay simultaneously.
Finally, Intel said that customers will be able to buy many of the Core X-Series processors by the holiday system this year. Hopefully, even in time for Black Friday.
