Crave high-end performance? We’re diving into all the details about Intel’s Skylake-X processors.
Over the last few years, there has been a ton of newfound competition in the CPU space – reigniting the endless war of AMD vs Intel. Enter Skylake-X, Intel’s answer to AMD’s massively successful Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs.
In 2017, AMD launched its Ryzen line or processors, and Intel was caught completely by surprise. For a while, we didn’t know how Intel would respond. We had heard rumors that Intel would launch Cannon Lake at Computex 2017, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Intel announced Skylake-X, a new line of Core i9 HEDT processors.
And, Skylake-X successfully competed with AMD. Intel launched the Core i9-7980XE at Computex 2017, and while we all saw it coming, we were impressed by the performance – even if it was so expensive that most users couldn’t afford it. But, it doesn’t end there.
About a year later, in 2018, Intel announced the new HEDT Basin Falls Refresh processors, like the beastly Intel Core i9-9980XE, based on the same architecture, along with a 28-core Xeon W chip.
Intel released the lower-end Skylake-X processors immediately following their reveal at Computex 2017 with the Core i7-7800X, Core i7-7820X and Core i9-7900X. All of which released on June 19,2017.
And then, Intel released three more enterprise-level processors in the following months, with the Intel Core i9-7920X, Core i9-7940X and Core i9-7960X all releasing by September 2017. Then, finally, Intel launched the beast itself, the Core i9-7980XE in late September, absolutely destroying everything in its path.
And, now that Kaby Lake-X chips are a thing – or, were a thing when they died unceremoniously – you might be thinking to yourself that all the fun ended with the 7980XE. However, Skylake-X isn’t dead yet.
Intel’s newest addition to this family was announced on October 8,2018 in the form of Basin Falls Refresh, the next generation of Skylake-X, aimed at dethroning Threadripper 2nd Generation.
