Positioned above the Core i7, leak claims. https://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2017/05/15/intel-leak-skylake-x-core-i9/1
I haven't been so confused in a CPU line-up in years. Honestly, the idea of a 4c/4t i7 is bonkers (considering current i7's start at 4c/8t and already go up to 10c/20t). The fact that Skylake-X is positioned above Kabylake-X is double bonkers, considering Kaby succeeded Skylake on current platforms. Naming the new HEDT platform X299 is triple bonkers, as the Z370 mainstream platform will look like the newer, more advanced chipset (Z comes after X, 3 comes after 2 and that's the system the industry has been adopting for years)... This will be even more apparent when someone sees a Kabylake-X i7 as a 4c/4t part, while Coffelake will bring a i7 6c/12t part. The quadruple bonkers will be when they release pricing info...
Normally I ignore stuff like this. I would ignore this one, but I had an I9 prototype a couple of years back. It was Westmere, and clocked to 1.6ghz. I looked up the ES code and it took me to a Chinese website that called it an I9 prototype. I think it was what they had lined up if Bulldozer was any good. I strongly suspect if it had been then the 980X and 990X etc would have been called I9s and there would have been more of them too (the hex cored chips like). So this could have credence. Ryzen isn't no Bulldozer, that's for sure.
Looks like Intel have rebranded the i7-extreme line as i9, and swapped the i7-extreme name to the new put-a-smaller-core-in-the-big-socket chips. If it weren't for the Kaby Lake cores, this would just be a rebranding exercise.
