Moore’s Law, the reality that the number of transistors on a chip has doubled every couple of years for decades, may be increasingly difficult for the semiconductor industry to follow, but Intel Corp. has still managed to handily up the performance ante with its latest desktop processors.

The chip maker today unveiled a new family of consumer central processing units called the Core X that sets several records in the speed department. It’s headlined by the Core i9 series, which replaces the Core i7 at the top end of Intel’s lineup. The flagship is an 18-core model dubbed the Core i9 Extreme Edition that can run up to 36 application threads at a time, more than any other product in the category.

This performance unsurprisingly comes at a premium, with Intel planning to sell the chip for a hefty $1,999. It sees the Core i9 Extreme Edition appealing mainly to game enthusiasts and power users who rely on resource-hungry applications to do their work. The company is targeting the same kind of buyers with the four other processors in the Core i9 series, which are designed for use in environments where it’s not essential to have the maximum possible performance but speed is still a top priority.

The most affordable chip has 10 cores and will carry a $999 price tag, while the model closest to the Extreme Edition offers 16 for $1,699. They ship with an improved version of the Turbo Boost Max included in Intel’s high-end CPUs that relegates workloads to the two fastest cores on a chip to improve performance. The result, according to the company, is that the series can run 10 percent faster than the previous generation in multithreaded mode and 15 percent faster otherwise.

Intel also included the new version of Turbo Boost Max in some of the lower-cost models that were unveiled as part of the Core X family. The company is augmenting its established Core i5 and Core i7 chip families with several CPUs based on its latest Skylake X architecture, along with four entry-level versions that are a generation behind.

The rollout shows that Intel is determined to maintain a strong grip on the PC market despite the lackluster growth in recent years. It’s especially significant in view of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s efforts to target the high-end segment with the recently introduced Threadripper chip series, which is designed to compete in the same price range as the Core i9 family.

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said the new chips are clearly aimed at gamers, mixed reality users, video editors, programmers and enthusiasts willing to pay a lot for that performance. “While these parts were on Intel’s roadmap for a while, the pull-in was a direct response to AMD’s Ryzen desktop parts that have a received a warm welcome,” Moorhead told SiliconANGLE. “Intel hadn’t had an architecture improvement at the high end in a very long time and their customers will welcome it.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photos: Intel