Intel has taken the wraps off three new 9th Gen desktop Core CPUs for gamers and mainstream users, as well as a new range of Core X-Series CPUs and also a Xeon consumer workstation CPU for extremely demanding content creators. The highlight of the new 9th Gen lineup is the Core i9-9900K with eight cores and a top speed of 5GHz, which the company is calling “the world’s best gaming processor”. Intel[1] also showed off motherboards from Asus[2], Gigabyte[3], MSI[4] and ASRock[5] based on a new desktop platform controller, the Z390, to go along with the 9th Gen Core processors.
The new Core i9-9900K marks the first time that Intel is using its Core i9[6] brand for a mainstream desktop CPU, supplanting the usual top-spec Core i7 model. It has eight cores with Hyper-Threading, for 16 total threads. The base speed is 3.6GHz and the single-core boost speed is 5GHz. The company is calling this the first “broad-volume” 5GHz CPU. There’s also a 16MB cache and dual-channel DDR4 RAM support. The rated TDP is 95W, and Intel points out that compared to the Core i7-8700K[7], the new Core i9-9900K has more cores with similar frequencies running within the same thermal envelope.
Intel claims that gaming performance is improved by up to 10 percent compared to the previous generation and up to 37 percent compared to a three-year-old PC. Similarly, video editing with Adobe Premiere is up to 34 percent and 97 percent faster respectively, as per Intel’s own testing. The company demonstrated a single PC with a Core i9-9900K running two games in separate virtual machines simultaneously, but gaming...