Details of Intel's upcoming Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X high-end CPUs - dubbed Core i9 - leaked online

Details leaked in Microsoft PowerPoint presentation showing Intel's plans for high-end desktop microprocessors

Details about Intel's new Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X microprocessors, dubbed Core i9, have been leaked. The leaks, in the form of a Microsoft PowerPoint slide reveal some of the design features that can be expected in six new Intel CPUs expected later this year.

The slide, published by an Anandtech forum member, who claims it is an internal Intel document, provides details of four new Skylake-X processors and two Kaby Lake-X CPUs.

The Skylake-X processors are described as Core i9. If the leak is genuine (and that's a fairly big if) the new Core i9s will replace Core i7s as Intel's top-of the-pile PC chipset range.

The most powerful of the new microprocessors will be the Core i9-7920X. Built on the Skylake-X architecture it will have 12 cores and supports 24 threads. No details about clock speeds were leaked.

The i9-7920X will come next with 16.5Mb of onboard L3 cache and supporting 44 PCIe lanes. Next will be the Core i9-7900X, with 10 cores, 20 threads, 13.75Mb of cache. Like its bigger brother, it also supports 44 PCIe lanes.

The 7900X processor reportedly has a base frequency of 3.3GHz, reaching 4.3GHz with Intel's Turbo 2.0 Boost Max technology for limited numbers of cores and 4.5GHz with Turbo 3.0 for single-threaded workloads.

The number of PCIe lanes in the eight-core Core i9-7820X and six-core Core i9-7800X is reduced to 28, and the boost clock speed of the latter to 4GHz.

The new Core i9 chips all feature hyperthreading, and offer 1Mb of dedicated L2 cache, which is four times that on the Core i7-7700K.

Of the two new Kaby Lake-X CPUs, the Core i7-7740K processor is the more powerful with four cores, supporting eight threads, 8Mb of L3 cache, and a base clock frequency of 4.3GHz with Turbo 2.0 pitched at 4.5GHz. The four-core Core i7-7640K comes with 6Mb of cache.

Support for DDR4-2666 memory (dual-channel on Kaby Lake-X and quad-channel on Skylake-X) is another rumoured feature, while power specs are given as 112W TDP and 160W TDP, respectively.

It is thought the new chips will be available in the summer, possibly as soon as June. Prices are not known as yet.

The new CPUs, whatever specifications they eventually turn out to offer, will be up against stiff competition from AMD's newly announced Ryzen range, which have boasted performance competitive with Intel on multi-core and multi-threaded applications.

AMD claims that the Ryzen 7 (deliberately named to match Intel's Core i7 branding) will offer just under 10 per cent better performance for less than half the price of current Intel's current top offerings.

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