Intel Skylake-X Will Have Delayed Availability, 18 Cores to Come Later

At Computex, Intel announced their new HEDT lineup. Made up of Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X, the new CPUs run from 4 cores all the way to 18 cores. Furthermore, the new chips will use the updated LGA 2066 socket and X299 chipset platform. During the launch, Intel was a bit vague about launch dates for the CPUs. However, more information has come out from some relatively reliable sources, including Intel.

For Kaby Lake-X, the expectation is for a quick launch. After all, the chips are just modified regular Kaby Lake silicon. Kaby Lake-X is limited to 2 channels of DDR4 and features up to only 4 cores. Skylake-X is the real HEDT CPUs for LGA 2066. The CPUs have between 6 to 18 cores with Hyperthreading and up to 44 PCIe lanes. Unfortunately, it looks like Intel is not launching some of these chips anytime soon.

According to the latest information, most of Skylake-X will see a delayed launch. Intel hasn’t given a timeframe but a few samples have started to crop up. For now, we will see the 6 to 10 core Skylake-X variants arrive which are pretty much ready. The real kicker is for the 12 and higher core variants of Skylake-X. An ASUS representative first commented that the 18 core i9-7980XE would not arrive until next year. The ASUS representative then changed the comment to “later this year”. Intel has also not released any real technical details for the i9-7920X and higher, with mostly blanks spots.

If we split the balance, it appears that the 12 core and higher variants will not arrive until sometime in late 2017. This leaves Intel in a vulnerable position regarding Threadripper. If AMD executes well, they could strike the HEDT market first. As we know, Ryzen is relatively competitive against Broadwell-E. This is especially true of the typical HEDT workload which focuses on multithreaded performance. Since AMD is launching this summer, it will be interesting if Intel can respond in the next 2 months. Otherwise, AMD will win the 12 core and higher market.