Following what was expected, yet still surprising launch of AMD RYZEN, and lackluster performance from its broken “Tick-Tock-Tock-Tock…” cadence refresh called “Kaby Lake”, Intel started to pull multiple moves in the background to react to the threats to their core business. Just like the rise of GPU was met with a multi-billion acquisition of Altera, whose combined x86-FPGA processors are still nowhere near the market launch, upcoming End of Life / Termination notice for Xeon Phi and rushed multi-billion acquisition of Mobileye… the reactions are starting to look chaotic and unplanned.
Reliable sources report that Intel brought forward the launch of their 2017/18 platforms: two month “fast forward” for Basin Falls platform (X299) and four months for yet another Skylake-Kaby Lake refresh codenamed “Coffee Lake”. Basin Falls platform is not unknown, as this is the X299 chipsed powering the next HEDT – High End DeskTop platform known as Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors. Kaby Lake-X brings i5 and i7 (quad-core) processors with somewhat higher clocks, faster default RAM clock and no integrated graphics. Basin Falls will be presented at Computex 2017 (May 30 to June 3). Skylake-X, formerly known as Skylake-E series includes six, eight, ten and twelve core processors. 12 cores will still launch in August though, as even the server/workstation variant endured a change. August will also bring the Coffee Lake and 300-Series platform that will traditionally launch with the “heaviest” Z370 chipsets and several K-series Core i7, i5 and i3 processors. The mainstream Coffee Lake processors, including the mobile line will follow latter in the year (Q4) or early next year (2018). Coffee Lake is supposed to bring increased number of cores to mainstream (six-core or sexa-core processors):
It doesn’t sound like Intel plans to bring innovation to the table (like tangible IPC improvement), but only release earlier what was planned for the past couple of years. On the other side, AMD brought decent (and affordable) RYZEN platform but of course in accordance with themselves, shot himself in foot by previously selling its chipset division which resulted with circus and compromised the success of the platform. Still, AMD is coming with 16-core, 32-core RYZEN processors bringing even more performance, like their own HEDT processor using the rumored X399 chipset, with six or eight channel RAM. So far, with old (new) RX 580, from the three main PC powerhouses, looks like only NVIDIA is giving a real deal power boosts.
