Intel Core i9-9900KS 5GHz Beast CPU Ships In October, Cascade Lake-X Guns For Threadripper

Intel first announced its Core i9-9900KS processor way back in late May, and we haven't heard much from them about the product since then. The Core i9-9900KS will be Intel's new enthusiast-class flagship processor for its mainstream platform and it promises to pack a serious performance punch.

Intel today confirmed that the processor will begin shipping in October, although no exact date was given. At its heart, the Core i9-9900KS is an 8-core / 16-thread 9^th generation Core CPU built on Intel's 14nm++ process tech. Not only does the processor feature a tweaked base clock (now sitting at 4GHz compared to 3.6GHz on the Core i9-9900K), but it can boost to 5GHz across all eight of its physical cores. This marks a 300MHz uplift compared to the Core i9-9900K and Core i9-9900KF.

Given the base/boost frequencies increases, Intel will most likely have to increase the TDP of Core i9-9900KS, which could potentially impact motherboard compatibility. Most of the enthusiast-class motherboards a chip like this will be used in, however, should have plenty of power headroom available to accommodate the Core i9-9900KS. Intel was live demoing a Core i9-9900KS system out at IFA in Berlin, and along with a GeForce RTX 2080 GPU pushing the pixels, the system was reportedly cranking out over 100 FPS at 25% CPU utilization in Hitman 2 at 1080p. 

In other news, Intel also announced that its next generation Cascade Lake-X processors will offer a 1.74x to 2.09x uplift compared to Skylake-X in terms of performance-per-dollar. The company is also claiming that the performance value of these Cascade Lake-X processors will outpace that of AMD's second-generation Ryzen Threadripper family.

We should note that while that may indeed be the case with regards to its projections against the current Ryzen Threadripper processors (which top out with the 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX), AMD has confirmed that third-generation 7nm Zen 2 based Ryzen Threadripper 3000 processors are on the way, and they could seriously shake up the performance-per-dollar equation as well.