Intel worried about AMD Ryzen, prepping Core i7 7740K and Core i5 7640K

Another hot rumor about how Intel will respond to the arrival of AMD's Zen architecture is making the rounds. The origin of this news is Canard PC, a French tech magazine that cites anonymous sources. As usual, I recommend to take this news with a grain of salt but it's worth nothing that Canard PC scored some reliable exclusives in the pasts, including of the site's authors scoring an early sample of the AMD K8 many months before the chip's launch date.

Intel marketing team underestimated Ryzen
One of the first claims of the site is that Intel's marketing team underestimated the strength of AMD's Zen architecture. The reporter says Intel's marketing department prepared an internal presentation last autumn that showed the chip giant had nothing to fear from AMD's upcoming processor lineup. A lot has changed since then as AMD's early previews of Zen indicate the architecture is quite potent and Intel is worried that AMD's flagship model may beat the performance of its Core i7 6900K (initially $1,200 but now available for $1,049) at a much lower price.

Intel prepping Core i7 7740K and Core i5 7640K
So to combat Ryzen, a couple of new quad-core Kaby Lake chips were cooked up at Intel. CanardPC heard from multiple sources that Intel is planning to release a Core i7 7740K and Core i5 7640K.

The Core i7 7740K reportedly has a 4.3GHz baseclock, which is 100MHz more than the 7700K, and has a TDP of over 100W, which is more than the 91W of the regular lineup. The Boost frequency is unknown but it will probably be around 4.6GHz.

Next we have the Core i5 7640K, which is basically a faster version of the 3.8GHz 7600K. The 7640K will have a 4.0GHz base clock but will also have a TDP of over 100W. Interestingly, this Core i5 chip may get Hyper-Threading but the site's sources are in conflict about this snippet of information, one source says the 7640K has HT while the other source claims it doesn't have HT.

CanardPC expects to get its hands on a 7640K engineering sample later this week and will report more details soon. If it's true, it means we'll see the first 4C/8T CPUs from Intel in the mid-range segment.

Intel may have more up its sleeve to combat Ryzen
As noted earlier in the article, the Ryzen chips from AMD are more powerful than Intel projected and this has the chip giant scrambling to come up with an answer. The specifications of the 7740K and 7640K are subject to change and, based on what it perceives AMD will launch early March, Intel may add even more new models at the last minute or change its pricing structure. As CanardPC reports, there's some proof here of healthy competition returning to the x86 CPU market.

It appears AMD still has some problems of its own though, more about that in our next news post.