Intel's upcoming ninth-generation of its Core CPUs are just weeks away from release, with new rumors suggesting that we could see the first chips in the range land as soon as October 1. The first ones available will be the most powerful and therefore the most expensive, but they should offer the most credible competition for AMD's Ryzen refresh and potentially help steal a little of the thunder of AMD's monstrous second-generation Threadripper CPUs which are now just days away from release.
The three CPUs that are slated to debut at the start of October are the Intel Core i5-9600K, the Core i7-9700K and the Core i9-9900K. They are six, eight, and eight-core CPUs respectively, with only the Core i9 model enjoying the doubling benefits of hyperthreading, giving it 16 threads. This will be the first generation of Intel CPUs since the inception of the Core series to not give hyperthreading support to i7 CPUs.
The Core i9-9900K will also enjoy high clock speeds. It will feature a base clock of 3.6GHz and will be able to reach 5GHz when boosted during single and dual-core processing scenarios. When all eight cores are engaged, it will still be able to make 4.7GHz, as per WCCFTech.
The Core i7 CPU won't be quite as hefty, but it will still be able to offer up to 4.9GHz on a single core and 4.6GHz across all cores if required. In a similar fashion, the 9600K will brings things down a notch further to 4.6GHz on one core and 4.3GHz on all six cores.
Despite the additional performance of the 9900K though, it still keeps in line with just 95w power draw, the same as the i5 and i7 parts.
Additional nine-series CPUs will debut a little later, offering more mainstream, non-overclockable performance.
