Enlarge / This is a 10-core Skylake-X processor. It uses the low core count (LCC) version of the Skylake-SP die. (credit: Fritzchens Fritz)

Earlier this week, Intel showed off a product coming in the fourth quarter of this year: an enthusiast-oriented 28-core processor running all cores at 5GHz. This combination of clock speed and core count would put it head and shoulders above any other processor on the market, so the demonstration was more than a little surprising.
It now turns out that Intel forgot to mention an important detail: the 5GHz processors were overclocked, a lot, using chilled water coolers capable of handling thermal loads of up to 1.77kW. The real chips that ship won't be coming from the factory at 5GHz, and it's going to take a lot more than a big heatsink and a couple of fans to get them running that fast.
Aside from the core count and release window, Intel has confirmed one other fact about these 28-core chips: they're built on some variant of its 14nm process. They also use the enormous LGA3647 socket (that's 3,647 pins) used by some Xeon processors, and they have six memory channels. We don't know what platform/chipset this will use (though it's likely to be a close relative to the comparable server platform). And we don't know what its regular clock speed will be.

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