Just few days after AMD has announced the release of
the new Threadripper beast, Intel seems to answer that
by unveiling first specs of the new upcoming i9 flagship.
With 8 cores/16 threads it is said to be as fast as the…

new AMD Threadripper 2990X that comes with 32 cores/64 threads. However I doubt that Inten can squeeze out so much power from one fourth of the processing cores. However there are no specs on the CPU speed available yet. AMD’s baseline speed for the 2990X is 3.4GHz where up to 4 cores can boost up to 4.2GHz if needed. First overclocking attempts have further shown that the Threadripper will also do fine if clocked to 4.12GHz on all cores resuling in a massive performance boost.

Doubtful if Intel can cope with that. A compared Xeon server processor did not perform as fast as the Threadripper and the former flagship, the i9-7900X had to compromise that it’s 8 cores cannot deliver more than about one fourth of the performance of the threadripper.

So it’ll be interesting to see how Intel tries to squeeze out more power out of 8 cores to cope with AMD’s 32-core Threadripper monster. For once it seems as if AMD has the better strategy out there but it’ll force Intel to eiter rethink it’s strategy on the market or – what would be better for customers – lowering the price for existing processors and set a lower initial price for upcoming processors.

The processor will run on a z390 chipset-based motherboard so it’s likely that a simple microcode update may fit existing motherboards to run the 9900X.

The Z390 chipset features a lot of powerful peripheral components to build high end systems. and if connectivity is important to you, you might be happy to hear that the Z390 chipset design requires motherboard designers to ensure the support for the following connections: Intel Wireless AC adapter, Bluetooth 5.0 and up to six USB3.1 connectors. It will be interesting to see if current high-end motherboard manufacturers will deliver a microcode update soon for their products.