New Intel Core i9, Core i7 and Core i5 specs leaked

Intel to throw more cores and higher clock-rates at its AMD problem

New leaks indicate that Intel is planning a trio of six and eight-core CPUs, one offering a boost clock of up to 5GHz, as it bids to take on the growing challenge posed by AMD's second-generation Ryzen microprocessors.

At the top end of the scale, the Intel Core i9-9900K will be an eight core, 16-thread part with a 16MB of cache. It will run at a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, but be capable of boosting up to 5GHz - or 4.7GHz on all eight cores.

The Intel Core i7-9700K, meanwhile, is an eight core, eight-thread part, also running at 3.6GHz, but boosting to 4.9GHz on a single core and 4.6GHz on all eight cores.

Finally, the Intel Core i5-9600K offers six cores and six threads and a base clock speed of 3.7GHz, boosting to a maximum of 4.6GHz on a single core and up to 4.3GHz across all six of its cores.

All the parts offer a TDP of 95 watts, while the ‘K' denotes that all are unlocked and overclockable.

While the raw clock speeds are impressive - especially the boost clock capabilities across all cores - question marks will be raised about the lack of hyper-threading, given the effort both Intel and AMD have been putting in to encourage developers to take full advantage of their CPU features.

Many games, for example, are dependent on single-core performance, rather than taking advantage of the fact that the average user has at least a dual core PC.

Specialist applications, particularly graphics applications used by engineers, architects and designers, meanwhile, tend to make better use of these features.

The leaks come courtesy of Asia-based enthusiast website Coolaler, via Guru3D.

The push to 5GHz clock speeds impose significant thermal dissipation challenges for chip engineers, but come after Intel launched a limited edition Core i7-8086 CPU, which offered a 5GHz boost clock on a single core in homage to the first Intel 8086 CPU, which ran at 5MHz.