Intel’s i9-8950HK CPUs in Laptops at 6C/12T, 4.8GHz

By Published April 03, 2018 at 3:12 am
Intel’s i9-8950HK CPUs in Laptops at 6C/12T, 4.8GHz
Hardware

Intel has migrated its new i9 processor family to the portable market, or semi-portable, anyway. The i9-8950HK is an unlocked, overclockable 6C/12T laptop CPU, capable of turbo boosting to 4.8GHz when power and thermal budget permits.

The new i9-8950HK runs at a base clock of 2.9GHz, with single-core turbo boosting to 4.8GHz. We are unclear on what the all-core turbo boost max frequency is, but it’s clearly lower. TDP is rated at 45W, though note that this is more a measure of the cooling requirements and not the actual power consumption; that said, Intel’s TDP ratings almost always explicitly coincide with power consumption numbers. The 8950HK will move away from the quad-channel support of its desktop brethren, and instead move down to dual-channel memory at a base frequency of 2666MHz. Unlocked motherboards should theoretically permit higher memory speeds, though we are uncertain of the market options at this time.

Cache is also a major point of differentiation, with the i9 including 12MB combined cache, versus the 9MB of i7 and i5 portable offerings.

Alongside the 8950HK, Intel is also shipping an i7-8750H, i7-8850H, and Xeon CPUs (2186M and 2176M). The Xeon CPUs are 6C/12T parts that operate at 2.9/4.8GHz and 2.7/4.4GHz, respectively. TDP remains 45W for both of these parts.

Gigabyte is one of the launch partners, and has announced the following SKUs:

SKU

Short Description

MSRP (April)

X5 v8-CL4D

15.6" FHD 144Hz IPS i7-8850H GTX 1070 GDDR5 8GB DDR4-2666 8GB x2 PCIe NVMe 512GB x1 HDD 1TB  G-SYNC  Win10

$2,599

X7 DT v8-CL4D

17.3" FHD 144Hz IPS i7-8850H GTX 1080 GDDR5X 8GB DDR4-2666 8GB x2 PCIe NVMe 512GB x1 HDD 1TB G-SYNC Win10

$2,999

X9 DT-CL5M

17.3" FHD 144Hz IPS i9-8950HK GTX 1080 GDDR5X 8GB DDR4-2666 16GB x2 PCIe NVMe 1TB HDD 1TB G-SYNC Win10

$3,899

 

We are presently unsure if we’ll be testing these parts.

Editorial: Steve Burke

Steve Burke

Steve started GamersNexus back when it was just a cool name, and now it's grown into an expansive website with an overwhelming amount of features. He recalls his first difficult decision with GN's direction: "I didn't know whether or not I wanted 'Gamers' to have a possessive apostrophe -- I mean, grammatically it should, but I didn't like it in the name. It was ugly. I also had people who were typing apostrophes into the address bar - sigh. It made sense to just leave it as 'Gamers.'"

First world problems, Steve. First world problems.

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