It looks like Intel is going to release their upcoming flagship Core i9-7980XE in few months. According to the latest rumors, the Core i9-7980XE features 18 cores and 36 threads, and it might be combined with 24.75 MB of L3 cache. The base clock is set to 2.60GHz which is a pretty significant step down from the Core i9-7900X's 3.3GHz.


The addition of the Core i9-7980XE doesn’t come as a surprise, it was pretty predictable that Intel was planning this flagship CPU in response to AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper. The Core i9-7980XE is going to ship with a price tag of $1'999 US, which is as monstrous as the chip’s specs. Compare that to the $999 US the Threadripper 1950X is setting you back, still featuring 16 cores and 32 threads and the price of the Intel chip almost can’t be justified. Apparently, we don’t yet know how this monstrous chip is going to perform, but we can’t imagine that the Intel Core i9-7980XE with a base clock of 2.60GHz is going to be 100% faster than the Ryzen Thradripper 1950X.

On another note the Core i9-7980XE is rated at 165W TDP. This is yet another 25W more than what the Core i9-7900X is burning, which results in even more punishment on the motherboard’s VRM. We’re curious to find out how the current boards are going to cope with the ever increasing loads on the VRM’s. Maybe more and more vendors will simply have to add active cooling to their high-end motherboards.



Source: Wccftech