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Intel steps up the core wars by announcing a 28-core CPU shipping this year

Intel Core i9 X-series tech

Intel is shipping a 28-core single socket processor in Q4 this year. Yes. Twenty-eight cores. What would you do with all that Intel silicon?

So not only has Intel finally officially announced the Core i7 8086K CPU, but at Computex today it has also shown off the next generation of, presumably Core i9, processors running at 5GHz with all cores being stressed by the Cinebench R15 benchmark. Live. 

That’s a whole ten extra cores compared with Intel’s current top single-socket CPU, the Core i9 7980XE, and we saw the new megacore monster chewing through Cinebench’s CPU rendering package almost faster than I could grab a quick fuzzy picture of it. The multi-threaded index score of 7,334 isn’t necessarily the fastest score you’ll have seen on Cinebench, but it’s definitely the fastest single-socket score.

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We saw the unreleased chip running with all 28 cores hitting 5GHz while, even with the 7980XE hitting the same frequency when overclocked, the previous megacore chip could only manage 5,029 in the same benchmark. 

That puts the new chip at least 46% quicker than Intel’s current best consumer processor. In general terms the 7980XE will hit 4GHz as standard, and at that stock speed it delivers 3,385 in Cinebench, making the 28-core CPU some 91% quicker.

Intel 28 core CPU Cinebench

We don’t have an official release date for the new monster processor, but Intel’s Gregory Bryant did say that it would be productised in Q4 of this year. So you’ll be able to spend a few thousand on a new 28-core CPU this year. And I’m guessing that’s going to need a new motherboard too…

Looks like AMD is going to have to do some catching up with Threadripper 2… and we might hear a little bit more about that at its Computex press conference tomorrow.