Intel 18-core i9-7980XE CPU leaks
Intel 18-core i9-7980XE CPU leaks
When we first heard of Intel’s new i9 series of Skylake-X CPUs, we were surprised to hear that the 12-core i9 7920X would be the series flagship.
Ending the name of a flagship product with a 20 rather than a 50 or higher seemed very odd, though if these new leaks from Videocardz are true it looks like the series will scale up to a total of 18-cores, which is 50% more cores than were previously thought and more than enough to compete with AMD’s 16-core Threadripper.
This will give Skylake-X 6-core, 8-core, 10-core, 12-core, 14-core, 16-core and 18-core variants, though the 12-core models are not expected to launch with X299 next month. All recent rumours seem to indicate that these products are not ready for launch in June, which means that Skylake-X will likely scale to 10-cores at launch.
| Archtecture | Cores/ Threads |
L3 Cache | PCIe Lanes | Base Clock | Boost 2.0 | Boost 3.0 | Launch | |
| i9 7980XE | Skylake-X | 18/36 | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| i9 7960X | Skylake-X | 16/32 | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| i9 7940X | Skylake-X | 14/24 | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| i9 7920X | Skylake-X | 12/24 | 16.5MB | 44 | – | – | – | August |
| i9 7900X | Skylake-X | 10/20 | 13.75MB | 44 | 3.3GHz | 4.3GHz | 4.5GHz | June |
| i9 7820X | Skylake-X | 8/16 | 11MB | 28 | 3.6GHz | 4.3GHz | 4.5GHz | June |
| i9 7800X | Skylake-X | 6/12 | 8.25MB | 28 | 3.5GHz | 4.0GHz | – | June |
| i7 7740K | Kaby Lake-X |
4/8 | 8MB | 16 | 4.3GHz | 4.5GHz | – | June |
| i7 7640K | Kaby Lake-X |
4/4 | 8MB | 16 | 4.0GHz | 4.2Ghz | – | June |
The below slide showcases X299’s support for quad channel DDR4 2666Mhz memory, a new version of Intel Turbo Boost 3.0 technology and a different cache structure than the companies previous X99 series of Haswell-E and Broadwell-E series CPUs.
At this time these rumours cannot be verified, though they are certainly possible. Intel already creates larger than 10-core Xeon server CPUs for in their Broadwell-E LGA 2011-3 socket, opening up the possibility to higher core counts if these CPUs shipped with an unlocked multiplier and a more consumer-oriented feature set.
Intel seems to be worried about Ryzen and Threadripper, as otherwise, they would not be shaking up their enthusiast X299 platform so drastically.
You can join the discussion on Intel’s rumoured 18-core i9-7980XE CPU on the OC3D Forums.
Special thanks to The F34R Channel for bringing this to our attention.