Intel Reveals Select Core i3 & i5 9000-series Processor SKUs In Public Document

It’s not entirely clear when they’re going to get here, but Intel is already revealing some information about its next mainstream processor series, rumored (and expected) to fall under the 9th-gen Core line. The sleuths at VideoCardz found a document sitting on Intel’s servers that reveals a number of 9000-series processors, with the i5-9600K being the highest-end model we know about at this point.

In absolute truth, there’s nothing to get excited over here, at least right now. The i5-9600K is spec’d extremely similarly to the i5-8600K, with a gain of 100MHz on the core clock, and 200MHz on Turbo. Those gains are appreciated, no doubt, but this is yet again going to be another Intel generation that’s hard to get too excited about. It’s an iteration, but we’re dying for a revelation.

Proving that these chips shouldn’t be treated as an entirely new series is the fact that it’s based on Coffee Lake-S, an iteration on Coffee Lake released last summer, and still built on a 14nm process. Harping on Intel’s inability to get 10nm mainstream parts out the door isn’t really worth it, since that’s not the biggest issue here. It feels to me like Intel needs to take an entire generation off and release products that feel like worthwhile iterations, not just more speed-bumps. This kind of release cadence is fine if you only upgrade your rig once every handful of years, but if you regularly upgrade, it can be a bit maddening.

Meanwhile, AMD is out there touting Ryzen Threadripper 2, which will feature models up to 32-cores / 64-thread in design. Intel needs to hope that AMD somehow stumbles on Zen 2, because the underdog is catching up quick, and right now, it’s without question the more entertaining company to watch. It was barely ten-years-ago when Intel gave us “overkill” systems like Skulltrail. Now it’s AMD doing that heavy-lifting. I hope things change sooner than later; it’d be much more exciting if both AMD and Intel kept CPUs exciting, rather than trade blows every few generations. But for now, it’s just great to see AMD kicking ass in the CPU space.