It is always quite amusing when retailers pre-announce products before the company actually pushes out a press release. Embargo or not, the retailers want to advertise the fact they will be getting stock and want to sell early – in the gaming industry, people pre-order games, but in the PC industry, you rarely pre-order hardware. Nonetheless, today’s news comes from online UK retailer Kikatek, which has already listed some of Intel’s 9^th Generation Core 35W CPUs as coming out on May 15^th.

Intel’s 9^th Generation Core family, known as the Coffee Lake Refresh, has had an interesting birth. Having first released the high-end overclockable processors, the rest of the processor stack has seemingly got stuck in Intel’s system – coming out in drips here and there. This might appear to be an odd implementation of Intel’s strategy, or there might be something more fundamental going on, such as the recent reports of Intel’s ability to manufacture enough processors for its customers. As a result, for the consumer lines at least, it is still selling plenty of 8^th generation CPUs based on what retailers have available.

What Kikatek has now listed on its website means that there will be more 9^th Generation Core processors to choose from, assuming they have them in stock: we now get Intel’s 35W offerings.

Intel’s 35W offerings have always been interesting. 35W is the Thermal Design Power, which as Intel indicates is the expected thermal design required for the base frequency of the processor. However, Intel’s processors rarely ever run at the base frequency – most of them have a form of turbo built in to the base design, such that even when all the cores are running, the frequency is beyond the base frequency. This means that the 2.1 GHz base frequency of the eight core sixteen thread Core i9-9900T might never be seen, and the power consumption of the chip might be beyond 35W.

It is worth reading our article here about Intel’s relationship with its TDP numbers to get a better understanding.

Why Intel Processors Draw More Power Than Expected: TDP and Turbo Explained

The best way to see the power consumption is to actually test the processors. Hopefully we will get some in for analysis.

Kikatek lists these processors as being announced on May 15^th. Subject to any Intel imposed delay, this seems to be a reasonable timeframe for launch. 

Update: It would also appear that GIGABYTE and BIOSTAR have both has these CPUs listed in their support lists, some of which have already been removed.

Source: Kikatek, Twitter

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