Intel finally has an answer to the new AMD CPUs announced earlier this week. The hardware and tech giant has unveiled the next generation of their CPU SKUs, including the new “Sunny Cove” architecture. These will compete with the 3rd gen Ryzen product line announced earlier this week. The announcements came during COMPUTEX 2019 today.
The AMD Ryzen 3700X, the Ryzen 3800X and the Ryzen 3900X will now have to contend with Intel’s new product line based on the 10nm process technology pioneered by Intel. The Intel offerings will include i3 through i7 processors with up to 4 cores and 8 threads. The clock speeds for these will have up to 4.1 max turbo frequency and up to 1.1 GHz graphics frequency on the integrated GPU suite. Speaking of GPU tech, Intel even has a new version of their integrated GPU base code that further optimizes resource processing and delivery for graphical applications.
Then there’s the i9-9900KS processor. This high-end evolution of the i9 series will be a more direct answer to the 3900X from AMD. The 9900KS has a base clock of 4.0 Ghz, with a full turbo of 5.0 GHz on both single core instances and all cores at once. This is a massive boon for the processor being billed as the success to the 9900K.
The new CPU offerings will support DDR4-2666, TDPs haven’t been revealed yet.
Gregory Bryant, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, had the following to say:
“No one wants to compromise; people want it all: battery life, performance, responsiveness, connectivity and slick form factors. Our job is to come together as an industry and deliver incredible and differentiated PCs, purpose built to what real people want. 10th Gen Intel Core processors – our most integrated CPU – and Project Athena are great examples of how our deep investments at a platform level will help fuel innovation across the industry.”
Getting into the nitty-grity details of these new CPUs, gamers and content creators are about to get some really good news. For one thing, the new performance optimizations are about to make overclocking much easier and more accessible. The final major announcement comes with the reveal of Intel Performance Maximizer (IPM). IPM integrates the Intel Adaptix Technologies toolkit to make it much easier for both OEMs and end-users to overclock their hardware. IPM can even be configured to automatically adjust clock speeds beyond the turbo boost settings to offer what is essentially automated overclocking.
Intel is also implementing the Intel DL Boost technology into these new products. Intel Deep Learning Boost will use AI-optimized sub-routines to deliver optimum performance for different applications. In essence, it’s Intel taking the idea Nvidia is using for DLSS and adapting it to CPUs. It’s obviously more complex than that, but that’s the broad strokes.
We’ll have to wait for more thorough benchmarks to land before we can compare this new set of hardware to the AMD lines, but we can expect a pretty interesting few months in holiday 2019 when these new Intel products drop.
