Intel Kaby Lake X Core i7-7740K And X299 Platform Details Leak In SiSoft SANDRA Database
The rumor mill doesn't seem to rest for a single day lately. We learned yesterday that AMD will be releasing both 4GB and 8GB versions of its RX Vega graphics cards, and that it will also be releasing Vega for notebooks. Today we learn a little bit about Intel's next big thing: Kaby Lake X.
Kaby Lake-X is going to represent the first chips available for Intel's upcoming X299 chipset for motherboard platforms, with Skylake-X chips with beefier specs to come later and ultimately supersede the current Broadwell-E chips.
Thanks to SANDRA, the popular benchmarking tool from the folks at SiSoftware, we're getting an early glimpse of at least one of these upcoming Kaby Lake-X chips, the Core i7-7740K. Found in a results database, we see this quad-core chip will be clocked at 4.3GHz, and will Turbo boost to 4.5GHz.
If those clocks prove true, then this particular chip will beat out the 7700K's base clock by 100MHz, which is to be expected since Intel now reasonably strong competition from AMD's Ryzen family of processors. It also seems very likely that when Skylake-X gets here, with its 6-, 8-, and 10-core variants, that the clocks will be a little more modest out-of-the-gate.
With this leak, we also learn of one new motherboard, ASRock's X299 Professional Gaming i7. Kaby Lake-X will make use of the X299 chipset, which will be the first major new enthusiast chipset in quite a number of years.
In a quick performance comparison, it looks like this Core i7-7740K fights a tough battle against AMD's Ryzen 5 1600, almost matching each other in an arithmetic test. The Intel chip does however come ahead in the multi-media tests by quite a large margin, which isn't a surprise, given the clock speed difference between the two, though the Ryzen chip as two more cores at its disposal. It's also shown that the Core i7-7740K will bring a dual-channel memory memory interface to the chip, just like the rest of Kaby Lake, although we'd expect Skylake-X to follow the quad-channel design that's been in place for the enthusiast platform since Sandy Bridge launched in 2011.
