Intel Launches Its 9th Gen Coffeelake-S CPUs Led By The Core i9 9900K

Happening now in New York City is the Intel "Fall Desktop Launch Event" where they are announcing their latest wares, much of which has already been leaked to date.

The big headline from this event is the Coffeelake-S "9th Gen" processor announcement. As expected, this latest step past Kabylake and Coffeelake but just a refresh as opposed to Cannonlake/Icelake. Coffeelake-S is intended to apply more pressure against AMD's Ryzen 2000 series.

Intel's high-end consumer CPU to match the eight cores / sixteen thread standard of the Ryzen 7 series is the Core i9 9900K. The i9-9900K is eight cores and sixteen threads while clocking up to 5.0GHz and costing $499 USD. A step below the i9-9900K is the Core i7 9700K at $399 USD or i7 9600K at $280. These Coffeelake-S models will be available beginning later this month (19 October).

With this Coffeelake refresh, sadly there isn't much to report on the UHD Graphics front. Judging from the continuous flow of Linux driver patches, it looks like Icelake is where Intel onboard graphics will become much more interesting.

Some of the other models expected based on previous leaks include a Core i5 9600K at 6-cores/threads that clocks at 3.7GHz with 4.5GHz boost, Core i5 9500 at 6-cores/threads with a 3.0GHz base and 4.3GHz turbo, and towards the bottom is the Core i3 9000/9100 models that are four cores. With Coffeelake-S, six cores is now considered the mainstream CPU standard on the Intel side. Over the earlier Coffeelake CPUs, most of these CPUs are clocked higher while managing the same TDP and core counts.

For workstations, Intel announced a Xeon W-3175X 28-core / 56-thread 4.3GHz processor with AVX-512 support... Quite a beast aimed to compete with the Threadripper 2900 series. This W-3175X CPU will begin shipping in December.

We are expected to have Linux launch-day benchmarks of the high-end Coffeelake-S CPUs on Phoronix.