With AMD finally set to competitive again with Ryzen, Intel is starting to make moves to secure their near monopoly. We’ve already seen some of those moves in the new Pentiums with HyperThreading and the i3 7350K which is unlocked. Apparently though, those won’t be enough and Intel is reportedly planning the much more drastic step of introducing HyperThreading to the top of the i5 lineup.
According to the report, Intel is readying a new i5 7640K which features, you guess it, HyperThreading. This would make it the first desktop quad-core i5 with HyperThreading ever. In other respects, it is much the same as the i5 7600K with a 200 MHz higher frequency and the same 6MB of L3 instead of the 8MB found in the i7s. To accommodate HyperThreading and the higher clock speeds, TDP is bumped up a bit to 100W.
While it is interesting to see an i5 with HyperThreading, the real deal will be how much it will be priced at. Intel, of course, has to be aware of the risk of cannibalizing the i7 7700K which really only offers 2 MB of L3. If the i5 7640K is priced too high, it loses much of its appeal as well. Another possibility is that the i7 lineup might retreat up to the 6 core with HyperThreading realm as well. With Coffee Lake, we are seeing mainstream i7s carry 6 cores and perhaps the 7640K is a stepping stone for i5s to fill up the quad-core space entirely, pushing the i7 higher.
Lastly, Intel is also reportedly planning the i7-7740K as well. This is just a 100 MHz boosted version of the i7 7700K with a higher TDP of 100W. It looks like Intel is taking AMD seriously over Ryzen, something that should give us optimism as to how that chip is doing.
