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takyon writes:

Intel's Skylake-X line-up has been finalized, ranging from the i7-7800X for $389 to the i9-7980XE for $1,999. 18 cores for over $2,000 (after tax)? Someone will buy it:

Intel's high brass made a decidedly un-Intel move last August. During a routine business meeting at the company's Santa Clara headquarters, they decided to upend their desktop CPU roadmap for 2017 to prepare something new: the beastly 18-core i9-7980XE X-series. It's the company's most powerful consumer processor ever, and it marks the first time Intel hsd[sic] been able to cram that many cores into a desktop CPU. At $2,000, it's the sort of thing hardware fanatics will salivate over, and regular consumers can only dream about.

The chip's very existence came down to a surprising revelation at that meeting last year: Intel's 10-core Broadwell-E CPU, which was only on the market for a few months and cost a hefty $1,723, was selling incredibly well. And for Intel, that was a sign that there was even more opportunity in the high-end computing world.

"The 10-core part was absolutely breaking all of our sales expectations," Intel's Anand Srivatsa, general manager of its Desktop Platform Group, told Engadget in an interview. "We thought we'd wait six months or so to figure out whether this was actually going to be successful. But within the first couple months, it was absolutely clear that our community wanted as much technology as we could deliver to them."

[...] If you've been feeling nostalgic for an old-school computing hardware war, we're about to get one. AMD also announced its Threadripper CPUs for high-end desktops a few months ago, and, as usual, they're significantly cheaper than Intel's offerings. The 16-core AMD 1950X will cost $999, with speeds between 3.4GHz and 4GHz. That's the same price as Intel's 10-core i9 X-series processor, while the 16-core model will run you $1,699.

Obligatory Intel Management Engine / AMD Secure Processor comment.

Also at Intel Newsroom.

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