Gregory Bryant took center stage this afternoon at the Intel Keynote session during the first day of Computex 2017. Amid a mountain of updates from the company regarding its strategy in the Data Center, IoT, Mobile and other segments, Intel finally got around to delivering the news that we’d all been waiting for – the official announcement regarding the latest Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X HEDT parts.

Confirming leaked news that had surfaced earlier in the day, the company confirmed that new Basin Falls platform will arrive with a brand new LGA 2066 socket and most importantly, feature models with as many as 18 cores. The new flagship processor will feature almost double that of previous Broadwell-E SKUs, with a Core i9 7980XE processor that packs 18 Skylake cores and 36 threads. Although Bryant did not name the new flagship model on stage, he did introduce the new Core i9 Extreme Edition series. Although no pricing was mentioned during the event, it is believed that the new Core i9 7980XE is expected to retail for a whopping $1,999 USD.

As well as introducing the new platform, Bryant also mentioned how the new chips were already 'crushing it', breaking World benchmark Records. A Kaby Lake-X Core i7 7740X was used in a behind-closed-doors media event last night hosted by HWBOT where several World Records were broken using Liquid Helium. Dubbed the ‘Performance Matters Helium Night’, Overclockers from the ASUS ROG team pushed the new parts beyond 7.5GHz in front of an audience of the world’s leading tech media. Learn more about the Performance Matters Helium Night here on the HWBOT World Tour website.