This move seems to be in direct reply to AMD’s Threadripper series, the second generation of which was also announced at Computex this year. Both of these products are aimed at the highest of the high-end workstation systems, providing an enormous amount of processing power to complete the sort of tasks that makes your laptop processor want to burst into tears. Take a look at our write up on the Intel vs AMD processor battle here.
Intel 28-core processor specs, features and pricing
The details we do know are as follows: The new processor runs on the LGA3647 socket, which is Intel’s Xeon enterprise level socket with 3647 pins. These processors are extremely large and so no current consumer motherboards currently exist that could take them, as the socket was originally designed for enterprise and server solutions. Intel demonstrated the processor at the keynote of its event at Computex, showing off all 28-cores running at 5Ghz, running Cinebench R15 to a score of 7334 points. These numbers suggest we’re looking at an overclocked version of the Intel Xeon Platinum 8180. ASUS and GIGABYTE were in attendance showing off their motherboards built to take these large chips. We’ll have to see if any consumer boards emerge for these chips, but as they seem to be targeted to compete with Threadripper to some extent we wouldn’t be surprised if they appeared fairly soon. As you might expect, power consumption and cooling on this thing is going to be a rather excessive affair. Power numbers from 300W all the way up to 1kW have been thrown around, and some rather substantial cooling apparatus was seen coming out of the back of the rig at the event. Intel was using a water chiller in the 5 GHz demo, specifically a Hailea HC-1000B, which cools the water running into system down to a brisk 4 degrees Celsius. Pricing is really anyone’s guess, but don’t expect to be putting one of these into your next gaming rig. Once you approach the higher end of the performance market, and we really mean the higher end, with six-channel memory and 28 cores, you’re going to be looking at a lot of zeros. Not even the gaming enthusiasts could justify the extra grunt this thing supplies, at some point you’re going to be paying several hundred dollars/pounds per extra frame you get in Fornite or PUBG. We’re expecting pricing to be somewhere around the Threadripper, probably a little higher as is Intel’s way – the proof will be in the pudding though, as we should start to see some solid numbers coming from both of these chips soon. Exciting times!
