Intel circulated a formal announcement of the discontinuation Skylake-X CPUs. This family of CPUs was its 9th generation Core X Series HEDT processor lineups. These processors were made for the LGA 2066 socket motherboards. Both the Skylake-X and the Kaby Lake-X processors were made for the Intel X299 platform.
The discontinuation also affects the 9th gen Extreme Edition and the Xeon processors. All the 9th generation Core series varied from the 8 core based Core i7-9800-X to the 18-core based Core i9-9980X.
Discontinuation makes way for current or new generation offerings
CPU and GPU production discontinuation is the natural cycle for all chipset makers. This is needed to either make way for the upcoming generation or to increase the production of its current offerings. Nvidia did the same with its RTX 20 series graphics cards (allegedly, of course), to make way for the upcoming RTX 30 series Ampere GPUs expected to arrive by next month. Despite the announcement, it is going to take a long time to stop manufacturing, distribution and sales.
Unlike for Nvidia and AMD Radeon, the process of discontinuation does not indicate an immediate halt. Intel will accept these orders until January 22nd 2021 and the last orders to be shipped out is before July 9th 2021. However, these are non-cancellable and non-returnable for the distributors. Therefore, it makes sense to make this announcement well in advance as Intel’s partners can make orders carefully. But end-users with warranty period will obviously be covered.
The fate of upcoming 10th generation CPUs are not known, apart from the already released CPUs. Perhaps this would ease Intel’s load and maybe concentrating on having a bit more SKU variants. At the time of writing, Intel only released four SKUs under its 10th generation Core X series. Or Intel will concentrate on Rocket Lake-S and the Alder Lake which is expected to be released next year. That’s something time will tell and speculation isn’t going to help anyone.
Source: TechPowerUp!
