Following Intel’s 28C CPU announcement from earlier today, the company also announced its i9-9900K CPU and “9th Gen” desktop CPUs. On stage, Intel dubbed its 9900K “the best gaming processor in the world – period,” before holding up the CPU in new packaging that clearly targets the Threadripper 2 packaging. Intel also declared that “we are breaking the laws of physics to bring you these parts,” which is clearly vehemently false, but we do get the point. The more correct phrasing is that “they’re fast.” We get the point, though.

Intel today announced its Xeon W-3175X 28C/56T CPU, not to be confused with the previously demonstrated 28C HEDT Skylake-X CPU from Computex. The CPU targets workstation users on Xeon platforms. Its intended use is for production, like Blender (a tool we use for our own animations) and other heavily multithreaded render applications. As these are heavily core-dependent, the use case is more pronounced than in production software like Premiere, which is frequency-dependent.

For frequency, the 28C/56T Xeon part operates at a native boost frequency of 4.3GHz – but Intel did not specify if this is single-core or all-core. It’s almost certainly single-core Turbo, leaving us uncertain as to the frequency in all-core boost.

We've been working hard at building our second iteration of the RIPJAY bench, last featured in a livestream where we beat JayzTwoCents' score in TimeSpy Extreme, taking first place worldwide for a two-GPU system. Since then, Jay has beaten our score -- primarily with water and direct AC cooling -- and we have been revamping our setup to fire back at his score. More on that later this week.

In actual news, though, it's still been busy: RAM prices are behaving in a bipolar fashion, bouncing around based on a mix of supply, demand, and manufacturers trying to maintain high per-unit margins. Intel, meanwhile, is still combating limited supply of its now-strained 14nm process, resulting in some chipsets getting stepped-back to 22nm. AMD is also facing shortages for its A320 and B450 chipsets, though this primarily affects China retail. We also received word of several upcoming launches from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA -- the RTX 2070 and Polaris 30 news (the latter is presently a rumor) being the most interesting.

We're ramping into GPU testing hard this week, with many tests and plans in the pipe for the impending and now-obvious RTX launch. As we ramp those tests, and continue publishing our various liquid metal tests (corrosion and aging tests), we're still working on following hardware news in the industry.

This week's round-up includes a video-only inclusion of the EVGA iCX2 mislabeling discussion that popped-up on reddit (links are still below), with written summaries of IP theft and breach of trust affecting the silicon manufacturing business, "GTX" 2060 theories, the RTX Hydro Copper and Hybrid cards, Intel's 14nm shortage, and more.

Other than news that our move into an office is nearly complete -- and that is big news, at least, for us -- the industry has been largely focused on GPUs for the past few weeks. NVidia's remaining 10-series GPU inventory has been purged down-channel to board partners, who are now working to drop 10-series video card prices in fire sales that lead into the RTX 20-series launch. We've also heard of Spectre and Meltdown again (it's been a while), with Intel pushing more microcode updates to assist in mitigating attack vectors. Those updates came with a brief "no benchmarks" clause, but that seems to have been addressed in the time since.

Separately: We'll be at PAX West this weekend for one day (Friday), and will be joining Corsair and PC World on a PC gaming panel at 7:00PM in the Sandworm Theater. Learn more here.

The show notes and article are below the video embed, if you prefer reading.