Finally the Skylake-10 serial is consummate. Later on hastily announcing the 18-core Core i9 terminal May during Computex 2022, we now have Intel'south new 16- and 18-core processors on-paw iv months subsequently.

We don't dubiousness that Intel had planned to release Skylake-Ten all forth, but did they program to offer something higher than a 12-cadre role before catching wind of AMD's Threadripper?

It also seems unlikely that they meant to announce the X299 platform in tardily May and release it in June, made evident by the rushed motherboard evolution and the mess that ensued.

We received the first Intel Core i9 role -- the $1,000 10-core 7900X -- in late June along with a few Cadre i7 models featuring 8, 6 and fifty-fifty four cores, but it wasn't until August that we learned the official specifications for Intel's new $i,200 12-core, $i,400 14-core, $1,700 16 cadre and a $2000 18-core processors, the last 2 of which we'll be reviewing today.

Before covering the Cadre i9-7980XE and 7960X in particular, information technology's worth remembering that during all the anarchy of Intel's latest desktop platform release, AMD launched its Ryzen Threadripper series on August 10 including the 1950X and 1920X, the latter being a $1,000 16-core CPU that shamed Intel's then flagship 7900X.

As we are about to see, in that location was more to come from Intel just at the time we questioned if the $1,200 12-cadre 7920X could even beat the 1950X and suspected that information technology would probably take the $one,400 14-core 7940X to friction match AMD'south sixteen-core CPU. While we don't take the 12-cadre or 14-core models, Intel has served up the ultra-expensive sixteen-core and 18-cadre chips which should give us an idea near where the 12 and 14-core versions will sit, and of course nosotros're ever neat to come across what the flagship parts accept to offering.

To apace epitomize, the Core i9-7980XE packs 18 cores and with its support for Hyper Threading information technology touts an insane 36-threads. Each cores has its ain 1MB L2 enshroud and thus in that location is a total of 18MB L2 cache. Meanwhile, there is 24.75MB worth of L3 enshroud and due to the restructuring of the cache for the Skylake-X architecture the 7980XE only has slightly more L3 than the previous generation 6950X.

The 7980XE operates at a base of operations frequency of two.6GHz with a Turbo Boost 2.0 frequency of 4.2GHz and a Turbo Boost Max three.0 frequency of 4.4GHz. The 16-core 7960X features a base clock speed of two.8GHz with the aforementioned Turbo Heave frequencies. It has a slightly smaller 22MB L3 cache while at that place is a full of 16MB for the L2. Both CPUs offer the full 44 PCIe lanes, quad-aqueduct retention back up and a 165 watt TDP rating.

Both CPUs use the LGA2066 socket and are supported past existing X299 motherboards. For testing I'thousand using the Gigabyte Aorus X299 Gaming ix with 32GB of Thousand.Skill TridentZ RGB DDR4 memory clocked at 1600MHz, so DDR4-3200, using CL14 timings. The GTX 1080 Ti was used for all the testing while we've thrown Vega 64 Liquid Cooled in for a few game tests. The focus though will of course be on the productivity testing, these are 18 and xvi-core CPUs subsequently all.

Benchmark Time

Retentivity and Application Performance

First upwardly let'southward cheque out the memory bandwidth functioning. These DDR4 quad-channel memory controllers await to be skillful for around 62-64GB/s of memory bandwidth when using 3200 retentiveness. Please note all configurations were tested with the same DDR4-3200 CL4 memory.

Cinebench R15's multi-threaded test gives us a good thought of how the productivity tests are going to wait if all cores and threads tin can be fully utilized. Here we see that the 7960X is just iv% faster than the the 1950X for the multithreaded workload, both are sixteen-core parts of course. The the 7980XE is 10% faster than the 1950X with an impressive score of 3317pts, though it does cost twice equally much at $ii,000 -- we'll certainly discuss pricing more at the stop of the review.

When information technology comes to single-thread performance, the higher clocked Skylake-X parts are able to best Threadripper.

Before we motion onto the more than serious benchmarks I simply wanted to see how these extreme CPUs stand upwardly in PCMark x which looks at office blazon workloads (typically non core-heavy). To my surprise, Threadripper scored well in this test and did considerably better than the Skylake-X CPUs. The 7980XE looked particularly weak here. Of course none of these CPUs are slow for these more full general office blazon tasks so it's somewhat irrelevant.

Excel provides u.s. an office type benchmark that can employ many threads, especially when running the extreme Monte Carlo simulation. Hither the Threadripper 1950X really impressed taking just 1.66 seconds. However the 16-core and 18-core Skylake-X parts go one improve as they dip down into the 1.4 second range allowing the 18-cadre part to complete the workload 14% faster.

For those of you lot unaware, VeraCrypt is an open-source utility used for on-the-fly encryption and features optimized implementations of cryptographic hash functions and ciphers which boost performance on modern CPUs. It as well supports parallelized encryption for multi-core systems as well hardware-accelerated AES to further improve performance.

In short, information technology takes full advantage of the many cores these CPUs have on offer and we see that here. That said, the Threadripper 1950X provided the all-time results and fifty-fifty the 7980XE couldn't beat it -- a disappointing result for Intel here.

Next up we take non-encrypted pinch and decompression performance using 7-Cipher. Whereas Hyper-Threading sees a similar level of efficiency when compressing and decompressing, SMT is significantly more efficiency for decompression work.

For decompressing, the Threadripper 1950X is again able to all-time the 7980XE, though it was much slower for the pinch test. If you do a lot of compression work and then it looks like Intel high core count CPUs are king hither.