Who's going to be first to test on the Core i9-7980XE?

[Bollwerk]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11464/intel-announces-skylakex-bringing-18core-hcc-silicon-to-consumers-for-1999/2

Only $2k for an 18 core/36 thread proc. =)

[MiRai]

You can get one now if you want to spend $2,500 on a Broadwell-EP Xeon (https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100160842%20601297037).

The problem, at least up until recently, is that more cores equals less clockspeed, and those CPUs listed in that link are only 2.1/2.3GHz with, I believe, a ~3.3GHz turbo. The -E edition CPUs from Intel have always been Xeons that generally don't cut it as a Xeon, so they have areas of the die disabled and are then sold to consumers at a similar price.

While the clockspeeds for the 14/16/18C Core i9 CPUs from Intel haven't been announced yet, you can see a trend in the base clock in this chart (https://videocardz.com/70005/intel-launches-core-x-series-with-up-to-18-cores-for-1999-usd) which begins to follow suit, where you lose 300MHz when moving from the 8C to the 10C. I expect a similar trend to continue as core count increases.

Intel is boasting about their Turbo 3.0 which will allow for certain cores to boost to 4.5GHz when necessary (slide shown on same link as above), but, in my opinion, boost is fairly worthless when you're trying to put load on a majority of the cores at the same time, unless you have proper cooling in place. I find it difficult to believe that anyone with a 12/14/16/18C CPU is going to be holding Turbo clockspeeds for very long on air-cooling.

This all seems very rushed from Intel, and it's thanks to AMD finally showing up to the fight.

Prior to this, in the -E chipsets, we saw the following CPUs offered as the top-tier for consumers: 6C SB-E, 6C IVB-E, 8C HW-E, 10C BW-E. However, when AMD finally brings some competition to the table and says they have a 16C CPU that they're ready to sell to consumers, Intel all of a sudden has 12/14/16/18C CPUs readily available, and the price of a 10C drops from $1700 to $1000. Intel has been milking the shit out of consumers for the past 5+ years because AMD has had nothing to offer.

Recently, AMD announced their "Threadripper" CPU which has 16C/32T, 64 PCIe lanes, and 40MB of L3 cache (https://videocardz.com/70093/amd-ryzen-threadripper-with-64-pcie-lanes), and this is fantastic. It's great to see AMD putting up a fight, and I hope they can solve the high-core-count-low-clockspeed problem because I'm tired of paying Intel's prices.

Now all we need is for AMD's Vega GPU to not suck, which should bring down nVidia's shitty prices too.