Is HEDT Worth It?

Why HEDT?

HEDT chips or High End Desktop Processors are chips that have numerous number of procsessing cores and are devoted to productivity and heavier multitasking. These are processors that have support for Quad Channel memory, more PCIE lanes, and have a very premium pricing. But are HEDT still the king of the hill?

Intel’s Complacency

Without any competition back in the days, Intel has been charging customers a very hefty steep price to get a HEDT chip, let alone Extreme Edition chips. Since then, consumers believe that 4 cores were for mainstream and anything more than 4 are HEDT. This resulted into Intel charging customers sometimes way more than what you actually want to have. Let alone for sometime it had lack a generation behind than mainstream, lacked integrated graphics, and more power. Now people were still paying Intel $1000 for the top end Extreme Edition chips. Not so long until Broadwell-X came and charged customers with a whopping $1700 for the Core i7 6950X. Then, Ryzen came along.

Thread RIPPED HEDT

Ryzen had been hyped, bringing 8 cores on a mainstream chip. It put a lot of pressure on Intel and more than the Ryzen Threadripper. Bringing more affordable HEDT chips with still great performance. Intel responded by a not in the plan X299 Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X HEDT chips that brought affordable 10 core CPUs. Well, they still charge a whopping $1800 for their Core i9 7980XE, at least it is 18 cores. But AMD had some other plans. It brought 16 cores for $1000. It is the same price as a Core i9 7900X, a mere 10 core CPU. And the trend continued with 2nd gen Threadripper that had a top of the line skew 32 cores, 64 thread 2990WX at the same price as a 7980XE, and it’s rebrand 9980XE.

Intel Killed their own lineup?

With the Core i9, people think they are prosumers. But to a surprise, the Core i9 9900K was even a mainstream 8C,16T part, which even made Intel effectively cannibalize their own existing HEDT chips, since the 9900K even outperformed it’s much more pricy brother 7940X. And, Intel has some secret 28C,56T CPU as a rebrand of the Xeon8180, a chip that costs 9 grand. Intel has been murdering it’s own Core i9 and even Xeon lineup.