Intel teases a ludicrous 28-core CPU at Computex, due late 2018

Intel is keeping busy. While the company didn't use Computex as the launchpad for its next line of consumer CPUs, this year's keynote did feature some pretty big surprises. After years of pretty stagnant core counts, Intel and AMD have gone crazy one-upping each other with new high-end chips with more and more cores, and we today Intel teased the next processor in that progression.

In the fourth quarter of this year, Intel plans to start shipping a 28-core CPU. And this is a single socket CPU that you'll be able to use in a future PC build. For the demonstration, the chip was clocked at 5GHz, though we don't expect that to be the final shipping product. [Update: we have some further details on the cooling and demo.]

If you can afford it, anyway. Intel's current top-end Core i9-7980XE, with a now pathetic 18 cores, is a $2000 CPU. How much will this one cost? Probably more than that. And that's about all we know about the chip for now, other than the obvious: it's fast. Watch the video above, from near the end of Intel's keynote, where they run through some benchmarks and give a taste of what the new CPU can do.

This thing's probably going to be able to run, like four instances of Crysis before it slows down.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).