PC World - USA (2019-10)

12 PCWorld OCTOBER 2019

NEWS UPCOMING WINDOWS 10 RELEASES

any further details along those lines. We still

don’t know the price either, although it’s likely

to be somewhere north of exorbitant.

Shrout positioned the products as direct

responses to its rivals. “The point is, we’re not

taking this sitting down, we see the

competition, we see the landscape as it

is,” Shrout said. “We’re adjusting

because we take these customers very

seriously. And we want to give them

the best product possible.”

Probably the more direct attack

against AMD’s Threadripper,

however, will be the upcoming

Cascade Lake-X desktop chip, which

Shrout said would ship in October. If

you recall the massive 18-core Core

i9-7980X and 16-core Core i9-7960X

(go.pcworld.com798x) that shipped

in 2017, they actually outperformed

AMD’s Threadripper,

but at a dramatically

higher price.

Intel was at least

honest about how

the older Skylake-X

architecture that

formed the

foundation of the

Core i9-7980X

shaped up to

Threadripper:

Unfortunately,

Intel refused to

answer any and all further questions about the

Core i9-9900KS, as well as the upcoming

Cascade Lake-X chip. But based on Intel’s

timing, we can probably assume that we’ll be

seeing a lot of top-tier PC chip news next

month, from both Intel and AMD.

Intel also took a shot at Qualcomm, whose upcoming 8cx chip is said to about

equal a Core i5 (go.pcworld.com/8ci5). Intel tried to establish exactly which

Core i5 was being referenced—the older Whiskey Lake—and how its latest

10th-gen “Comet Lake” (CML) parts would shape up.

During its presentation at IFA 2019 in Berlin, Intel showed the

performance per dollar of Skylake-X vs. AMD Threadripper

and the upcoming Cascade Lake-X, admitting that Skylake-X

was overpriced for what you got.