There’s a more efficient 14nm manufacturing process in play When Intel’s Broadwell-E CPUs were released a year ago, they didn’t offer anything particularly new, aside from the 10-core Core i7-6950X, along with its ridiculously expensive price that broke the £1,500 barrier. Charging that much money for a 10-core desktop CPU isn’t wise now though. This year, March saw the introduction of AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, which were not only just as quick clock-for-clock as their Intel counterparts in many tests, but also offered more cores for the same or less money. Now it’s Intel’s turn to hit back, with its brand-new Skylake-X range of chips, starting with the sub-£1,000, 10-core Core i9-7900X.
That 50 per cent drop in price could be due to several reasons. There’s competition from AMD, of course,…