INTEL’S NEW TOP DOG

THE LATEST CORE i9 NOW COMES PACKING 18 CORES

INTEL HAS A NEW FLAGSHIP CPU: the Core i9-9980XE, a 14nm process Skylake-X that boasts 18 cores. There’s an obvious rival in view, too: AMD’s 32-core Threadripper. The Core i9-9980XE has a base clock of 3.0GHz, with a Turbo of 4.5GHz, and a useful all-core Turbo of 3.8GHz. Adding two cores over the i9-9960X has cost 100MHz on the base clock, but it receives a bump in L3 cache, now 24.75MB.

Performance is mixed. For straight single-core jobs, it loses to its sister chips, who can pump the clock better, especially the 5GHz available to the i9-9900K. In multicore jobs, it struggles to keep pace with Threadripper’s finest. It’s very quick everywhere, nicely balanced overall, but it’s not often the absolute fastest anywhere.

Being Intel’s king of the hill, you know there’s a big number coming. The Core i99980XE launches at $1,979, $180 more than AMD’s Threadripper, the 2990WX. For straight gaming, there are faster, cheaper Core i9s. It’s lovely, but you pay for it.