You’re probably still coming to terms with the fact that you just spent your entire year’s avocado toast fund on a new Intel Core i9, but what if I told you there’s a new processor that’s about 10 times more expensive?
The Intel Xeon Skylake-SP Platinum series is not designed for you or me. For starters, I don’t have a spare $13,000 to spend on a processor, no matter how fast my Photoshop would be afterwards. It’s also got 28 cores, 56 threads, a turbo clock speed of 3.6GHz, and a power draw of 205W.
That’s the specs for the top-end 8180M processor, which is designed for massively intensive graphical and enterprise use. Even if you could squeeze it into a regular PC case with the requisite power and cooling, it’s not optimised for any of the tasks that a regular person is likely to use a computer for.
Of course, Intel isn’t a monster, and there are more “affordable” options. The cheapest Platinum-series chip comes in at $3,200, for which you get 16 cores and a clock speed of 2.6GHz. That’s far more realistic, and the kind of processor you’re likely to find in high-end workstation PCs, or possibly Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro and iMac Pro line.
