Some weeks ago, one of MSI's promotional posters for an unreleased Intel Core i9-9750H leaked, and it was assumed it would be an eight-core processor. Recently, new MSI and HIDevolution laptops featuring the -9750H as well as a higher-end Core i9-9980HK were listed on Amazon and confirm these i9 CPUs as having eight cores.

Retailing at $4,400 for the -9980HK laptop and $2,900 for the i7-9750H laptop, these two machines are aimed at the extreme high end of the laptop market, as evidenced by the other highly premium components like the RTX 2080 and 2070, over a terabyte of solid state storage on both laptops, 64 and 32GB of RAM for each laptop, respectively, and 4K 60 Hz and 1080p 144 Hz displays, respectively. The chips themselves are quite speedy; the -9980HK turbos up to 5 GHz (making it the fastest mobile processor at stock settings), while the -9750H can turbo up to 4.5 GHz, which is still pretty impressive.


Though Intel turns off Hyper-Threading for these CPUs, in all likelihood, they will be much faster than the Core i7-8750H thanks to having two more cores and much higher clock speeds. But we have to wonder whether even these massive MSI laptops can keep the chips cool enough to hit 5 GHz, or even 4.5 GHz, during a sustained load. These CPUs are probably on yet another iteration of the same 14nm process Intel has been using for the past few years, so don't expect any miracles when it comes to power consumption, heat, and all-core sustained clock speeds.


According to the listings on Amazon, these laptops will launch on the 23rd, meaning either Intel or MSI might announce them shortly.