Nine months ago, Intel reigned supreme from the low end, all the way to its flagship CPU - the Core i7-6950X, which offered 10 cores for a sum of $1,700. Then AMD fired a number of hard-hitting Ryzen-shaped salvos that turned the CPU market on its head and introduced some proper competition for the first time in a decade. While AMD's surprise arrival in the high-end desktop market with Threadripper allowed it to also claim the ultimate CPU performance crown, today sees Intel's fight back for the crown with the Core i9-7980XE or Extreme Edition - the most expensive, most powerful desktop CPU ever made and also the first 18-core desktop CPU.
It is a leviathan, yet Intel has opted for a single high core count die that's tiny compared to Threadripper, but trumps AMD's flagship by two cores and four threads and promises much more overclocking headroom too. The downside? The Core i9-7980XE costs $2,000. That's two iPhone Xs, just for a CPU, and that's before you've factored in all your other hardware including a potent cooler.
We're not talking about a great value CPU here, of course - flagships rarely are, but AMD's Threadripper 1950X is unlikely to be beaten in terms of value despite Intel launching a flurry of other CPUs today from 12 all the way to the 18-core monster it sent me last week to review today.
Indeed, this isn't going to be the best option for many people. Even if you're a keen gamer, the core count on offer here is unlikely to benefit many games. In the realms of content creation, though, more cores are very often better and its here that Intel is poised to usurp Threadripper in particular thanks to a core and thread advantage as well as the lead that Intel also enjoys in terms of efficiency.
The Core i9-7980XE stands at the top of a nine CPU line-up including 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 and 16-core CPUs, with the 18-core I'm looking at today sporting a base frequency of 2.6GHz, Turbo Boost of 4.2GHz and a Turbo Boost Max 3.0 speed of 4.4GHz. It has 24.75MB L3 cache and 1MB L2 cache per core, courtesy of the cache restructuring that took place with all of Intel's 14nm Skylake-X architecture CPUs.
Whether the CPU we're looking at today was a knee-jerk reaction to AMD's 2017 efforts and increasing market share or if it was on the cards all along, we may never know. What we do know is that the expansion in the high-end desktop market this time around is unprecedented, with the maximum core count rising from 10 to 18 and the number of CPUs for Intel's high-end desktop platform increasing from four to nine.
This clearly means war, and while the battle still rages in the mid-range, not least of all because Intel is expected to release six-core Coffee Lake CPUs in October to do battle with Ryzen, today is simply a fight for the fastest CPU of the moment. Until today that crown has been held since Threadripper's launch with the 1950X. So let's see what Intel's monster can do.
Firstly, let's talk about overclocking. I've managed to get Intel's Core i9-7900X - it's 10-core CPU in the same series to 4.6GHz using 1.24V. Given that there are nearly twice as many cores involved with the Core i9-7980XE, you'd be right to expect far less overclocking headroom as the heat buildup would be much more rapid. However, I managed to get the 18-core CPU all the way to 4.5GHz using just 1.18V, dropping just 100MHz compared to the 10-core CPU. I even managed to get to 4.6GHz, but the voltage needed saw the heat demand more than my all-in-one liquid cooler could give. Intel has a stunning CPU here - 4.5GHz across all 18 cores is incredible, although you'll need a decent cooler to keep temperatures under control. You can see the difference this made in the results below.
Test system: 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB 3,000MHz, Samsung 960 Pro 512GB M.2 SSD, Corsair AX860i PSU, GTX 1080 graphics card, Fractal Design Celsius 24 cooler Intel system: Asus ROG Strix X299-E Gaming, AMD system: Asus ROG Zenith Extreme
Content creation
Games and 3D performance
Power consumption
Performance discussion
I should point out that for the Threadripper 1950X, I used the best result obtained in either Creator (distributed) or Gaming (local) memory access modes. You can read more about what they are here. Where all its 18 cores are fully utilized, the Core i9-7980XE is an absolute monster. While the AMD Threadripper 1950X was reasonably close in the HandBrake video editing benchmark, the gap is larger than just a two core deficit would suggest. Once the two CPUs are overclocked, though, the Intel CPU is massively faster - over 40% in fact, thanks to that additional two cores and the fact it has a much higher clock speed.
The PCMark 10 photo editing test was also a win for the 18-core CPU, posting the fastest stock speed and overclocked results, although by smaller margins here. The frequency and core advantages once again came into play in Cinebench, though, with a noticeable lead at stock speed and a massively higher score than the AMD Threadripper 1950X with the two overclocked.
In games, there's rarely much of an improvement between the CPUs, but Ashes of the Singularity showed its continued love of cores and threads with the overclocked Core i9-7980XE posting the fastest score and only the stock speed Threadripper 1950X (it actually performed slightly better at stock speed as we couldn't overclock it as far as the XFR frequency) bettering it at stock speed. Here the lowly 3.4GHz all-core boost of the 18-core CPU is likely hampering things. In the other two game tests, it was a win for Intel.
Finally, power consumption was never going to be low and at stock speed, the Core i9-7980XE was somewhere between the Core i9-7900X and Threadripper CPUs. However, while that overclock ushered in some massive performance gains, it also saw the power consumption skyrocket under load to over 600W for the whole system, which is around 90W more than the overclocked Threadripper 1950X.
The new fastest desktop CPU on the planet: Intel Core i9-7980XE
It was fairly clear that with a huge amount more cores than the Core i9-7900X that the margins AMD had over that CPU were going to be eaten into significantly by the Core i9-7980XE. With slightly better efficiency per core and higher frequencies on occasions as well as greater overclocking headroom, plus of course two more cores and two more threads, most of us expected Intel to reclaim the performance crown.
It's done it in style too, with a stunning processor that uses a single die, which is an engineering feat in itself. Of course, AMD may have the last laugh here as it's multi-chip design with Threadripper using a high-speed fabric interconnect between them, is noticeably cheaper to manufacture. That said, Intel continues to win in many games and applications that are more optimised and this sees better performance in some games especially.
At $2000, though, this is the most expensive desktop CPU ever made and while it dominates the graphs, it's clearly not living up to its price tag of being twice the price of the Threadripper 1950X and Core i9-7900X. If you must have the fastest CPU on the planet, though, as far as desktop CPUs go, you'll want to go with Intel and its new monster flagship.
