Intel's Surprise 5GHz Core i9-9900KS Launching In October: Offers Exciting Cascade Lake X Tease Too

Intel has announced that its fastest ever mainstream desktop CPU - the Core i9-9900KS, which it announced back in May, will arrive next month and also offered some extremely interesting information about its next-generation high-end desktop processors, code-named Cascade Lake-X too.

Starting with the Core i9-9900KS, Intel's chief performance strategist Ryan Shrout announced the CPU will be released in October. The new part, which came as a surprise initially, will offer an all-core boost of 5GHz - that is, all cores will be able to boost to 5GHz out of the box. Currently, the Core i9-9900K can only achieve this with a manual overclock, which you can see below from my original review of that CPU last year.

There's clearly not much more than speed-binning going on here, selecting the best Core i9-9900K dies and ramping them up to allow a 5GHz all-core overclock. They're the exact same CPU otherwise, although multi-threaded performance will be significantly improved. It will be interesting to see how Intel prices the new CPU too, given it has already cut the price of the Core i9-9900K from a launch price of $579 to just $494 in the face of stiff competition from AMD . The latter is due to launch its Ryzen 9 3950X - a $749 CPU which has the fastest boost frequency of any 3rd Gen Ryzen CPU as well as 16 cores, next month too so while only two major mainstream CPUs will be launching next month, the battle will be no less important for both companies.

Pricing and value also played a part in Intel's second announcement from the IFA trade show in Germany this week, as the company revealed that its new Cascade Lake-X high-end desktop CPUs are also 'coming next month' and will offer up to twice the performance per dollar of its Skylake-X CPUs such as the Core i9-9980XE. This is extremely interesting as it suggests the company is either offering significantly more performance or is planning major price cuts - or both, with its new HEDT products to counter the likes of the Ryzen 9 3950X and indeed AMD's 3rd Generation Threadripper CPUs. It seems the 2019 CPU wars are not over and I'll be taking a look at them when they land so be sure to follow me here on Forbes, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube for more insights and news.