Intel's pride was surely dented when AMD came back into the high-end desktop arena armed with the Ryzen Threadripper CPU. Offering a potent architecture and more cores and threads than Intel could muster at the time, Ryzen Threadripper's beastly performance battered the Core i9-7900X into submission in the multi-core-optimised benchmarks. Sure, Intel was a tad faster for gaming, but the reputation damage had been done.

Putting it in context, 2017 has signalled a return to the desktop core wars. The middle of this year saw Intel back up its 10-core, 20-thread premium HEDT processor by moving from the Broadwell to Skylake architecture. AMD understands that its brand-new Zen architecture isn't quite as potent as the latest Intel Core, so decides to throw in more cores for your money. Ryzen Threadripper 1950X has 16 cores and 32 threads, and you know just how effective it has been at dismantling the best that Intel has to offer thus far.

It can be successfully argued that AMD's Threadripper has been the primary catalyst for today's release of Intel's finest desktop processor to date. And the chip giant has had to go to the latest Intel Scalable Xeon blueprint when building the CPU that it hopes will put AMD firmly back in its place.

Enter the Intel Core i9-7980XE.