Intel’s mysterious 9th-generation Coffee Lake Refresh processors are about to get even more perplexing, as a leak suggests the Intel Core i7-9700K will drop hyper-threading.
The Intel Core i7-9700K was just listed by SiSoftware as an 8-core and 8-thread processor, making it the very first Core i7 processor without hyper-threading enabled. Online speculation suggests Intel is abandoning its signature feature in favor of reaching higher clock speeds. These specs also claim that the Intel Core i7-9700K will run at a 3.6GHz stock clock.
Previously, we’ve heard a wealth of rumors and speculation crop up about the Core i9-9900K with its 8-core 16-thread design reaching a 4.7GHz boost clock across all cores. But this is the first time that the Core i7 part has hit the spotlight.
If we look at earlier speculation about the Core i9-9900K and how it’ll supposedly hit a 5GHz turbo speed across two of its eight cores, dropping hyperthreading could be Intel’s method of hitting 5GHz across all cores. So far Intel has only been able to achieve this speed with the single-core Turbo Boost on the Intel Core i7-8086K.
What does it all mean?
A 5GHz boost clock across all cores could mean that in most cases, the Core i7-9700K will perform similarly to the higher-spec Core i9-9900K. The only way we see the processor losing out in is heavy multitasking workloads, which hyper-threading provides a boost to.
Like the Core i9-9900K, the Core i7-9700K will be running on the Z390 chipset, at least to start, according to rumors and official leaks.
However this pans out, the 9th-generation Coffee Lake-S chips are rumored to be coming out in just a couple short months, with an announcement possibly happening as early as next month. So, we’re sure we’ll hear the final specs from Intel in the very near future.
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Via Wccftech
