You may have seen the Intel has just revealed its Core i7-8086K anniversary processor that’s capable of boosting to 5GHz out of the box, but the company has a bigger CPU gun up its sleeve: a 28-core processor that reaches the same clock speed.
Yes, Intel is readying a single socket processor bristling with 28-cores and apparently running at 5GHz across all transistors. With nearly 30-cores, it would certainly dwarf the six cores of the aforementioned 8086K.
Intel revealed this CPU with a demo at Computex, and Anandtech reports that a system powered by the processor hit a score of 7,334 in the Cinebench R15 benchmark. The chip giant also announced that this monster CPU would be out in the final quarter of this year, so this isn’t something for way down the line.
Scalable heavyweights
No further details were given at this point, so it’s unclear exactly where this model will sit in Intel’s range, or what socket it will use. Technically, Intel does already produce 28-core CPUs, in the form of the top-end Intel Xeon Scalable Processors aimed at heavyweight server usage.
But those chips top out at a turbo speed of 3.8GHz across their many cores, and 5GHz is quite a jump from there.
So clearly, there are some question marks over how Intel will manage power consumption when balancing that blazing clock speed with the core count. And of course pricing is another matter entirely – the top Xeon Scalable offering (Platinum 8180M) has a recommended price of around $13,000 (around £9,750, AU$17,000) at the time of writing, in case you were wondering what a 28-core processor will cost you today.
Still, this is an exciting revelation by Intel, and we are keen to hear more about exactly what form the new 28-core monster will take.
