This is a 45W processor with eight cores, 16 threads, and 16MB of cache, with a base clock speed of 2.4GHz and a turbo speed of 5GHz. The “K” on the name also indicates that the chip is overclockable: for those truly monstrous gaming laptops with high-powered cooling systems, you’ll be able to go beyond the default speeds.
Yeah, I read these specs and all I can think is, “oh boy those MacBook Pro’s just keep getting hotter and hotter.
At the top end is the i9-9900: eight cores, 16 threads, a base of 3.1GHz, and a peak of 5.0GHz. The big difference between this and the already-shipping 9900K and 9900KF is the power use: it’s a 65W chip, whereas the other two are 95W, and it’s not overclockable
Power, speed, heat. I feel like at this point Intel’s chips have passed the point of diminishing returns. I’m all for more cores and power. But that isn’t really what I need on a day to day basis. I am sure there are those that do, and for them the more cores the better, the tradeoff in heat and mobility is a welcomed compromise. For me, I don’t hit bottlenecks in my workflow with the CPU, haven’t in a very, very long time. Network, memory, possibly, and even then the times I’m waiting on my machine to preform a task is not even relative on the overall time spend in front of these things.
I’d rather have smaller chips, with longer battery lives, consuming less energy, for roughly the same amount of processing power. The idea of ARM based laptops is very exciting in this regard.