Intel's 28-core HEDT CPU Demo Was Dishonest About Clock Speeds

Intel is frantically putting together a new HEDT (high-end desktop) platform positioned above its current LGA2066 (X299) platform, built around its Purkey enterprise platform, and a variant of the LGA3647 socket (this chip + your X299 motherboard is no bueno). This socket is needed to wire out the 28-core Skylake XCC (extreme core count) silicon, which has a six-channel DDR4 memory interface. The company put up a live demo at the teaser of this unnamed processor, where it was running at 5.00 GHz, which led many to believe that the processor runs at that speed out of the box, at least at its maximum Turbo Boost state, if not nominal clock. Intel admitted to "Tom's Hardware," that it "forgot" to mention to the crowds that the chip was overclocked.

Overclocking the 28-core chip was no small effort. It took an extreme cooling method, specifically a refrigerated heat-exchanger, coupled with a custom motherboard (we suspect GIGABYTE-sourced), to keep the processor bench-stable at 5.00 GHz. Intel's defense to Tom's Hardware was that "in the excitement of the moment," its on-stage presenter "forgot" to use the word "overclocked." Gregory Bryant, SVP client-computing at Intel not only omitted "overclocked" from his presentation, but made sure to stress on "5 GHz," as if it were part of the chip's specifications.

"What's amazing is that trade-off, this actually being a 5GHz in single-threaded performance frequency and not...having to sacrifice that for this kind of multi-threaded performance, so you've got kind of the best of both worlds. So, you guys want to see us productize that thing? Tell you what, we'll bring that product to market in Q4 this year, and you'll be able to get it," he said. Rival AMD, meanwhile, showed off its 24-core and 32-core Ryzen Threadripper II processors, with its 24-core part beating Intel's i9-7980XE 18-core chip under ordinary air cooling.