It looks like Intel is ready to refresh their “Basin Falls” HEDT platform (LGA2066 client high-end desktop). They plan to do this with a new 22-core chip. This is not Skylake HCC (20 tiles, up to 18 cores), or Skylake HCC (30 tiles, up to 28 cores), but a brand new die with four more tiles than the current Skylake HCC silicon, all of which are actual cores. With this new die Intel could design 20 and 22-core SKUs made for the X299 Express chipset. This could be in direct response to AMD’s 24-core Ryzen ThreadRipper II processor, which AMD showed to beat Intel’s 18-core i9-7980X in tech demos. Remember Intel’s 28-core HEDT processor that they showed at Computex will not be compatible with LGA2066.
Intel is also putting their final touches on a new 8-core “Coffee Lake” die for the mainstream-desktop market (LGA1151, 300-series chipset). This die will have 8 cores and likely 16MB of L3 cache. It will however retain the iGPU and uncore components from the existing Coffee Lake-S die. The chip might also retain the classic “Ring Bus” design.
These new chips could launch in September of this year.
