If you covet nigh-impossible issues to get, you then’ll be comfortable that Intel’s ultra-powerful and uber-rare Core i9-9990XE processor has lastly reached retail.
Well, type of anyway. As famous by AnandTech’s Anton Shilov, German retailer CaseKing.De has listed the Core i9-9990XE for two.999,00 Euros or $3,376.08 American. This LGA2066 CPU packs 14 Hyper-Threaded cores based mostly on the Skylake-X microarchitecture, and it could run all these cores at 5GHz turbo frequency.
Don’t be stunned for those who’ve by no means heard of the Core i9-9990XE. The CPU isn’t in Intel’s official ARK database. It solely confirmed up on the radar when it surfaced earlier this 12 months as an “auction only” merchandise. And by public sale, that didn’t imply customers may nab them by bidding on them—it meant the businesses that constructed high-end PCs must bid on them to get one.
The auction-only strategy was derided by PC fanatics who felt overlooked of the motion, and by AMD followers who mentioned it was only a PR stunt to get consideration.
Intel has by no means commented a lot on it past saying that the Core i9-9990XE was constructed for particular use circumstances. A spokesperson reiterated that stance once we requested for a touch upon the processor’s retail availability:
“The Intel Core i9-9990XE is designed specifically for the financial services industry because of specific customer requirements. Because the Intel Core i9-9990XE was built with unique specifications and high frequency to meet the workload needs of this targeted industry, it can only be produced in limited quantities and will not be broadly made available. The part will be offered through an auction to ensure fairness in supply distribution.”
But conversations we’ve had with boutique distributors point out the Core i9-9990XE was principally an experiment to drum up pleasure.
IDGCaseKing.De is promoting maybe the rarest Core i9 ever made.
The thought was to present boutique distributors who already visitors in unique {hardware} and costs a good extra unique chip for his or her most discriminating clients. It didn’t all the time work out that approach although.
System builder Puget Systems gave the Core i9-9990XE an excellent going-over and located it to be a stupidly quick CPU. But even so, Puget determined it wouldn’t promote programs containing the powerhouse chip, citing its lack of guarantee, unpredictable availability, and extreme warmth manufacturing.
