Intel Monday revised prices of select 9th generation Core "Coffee Lake Refresh" desktop processor models. These price cuts target the "F" and "KF" brand extensions, which denote a lack of integrated graphics. The price cuts range from 5 percent to 20 percent, and cover key fast-moving SKUs popular with the DIY gaming PC crowd that likes to pair these chips with discrete graphics cards. The entry-level Core i3-9100F gets the biggest cut of the lot. The 4-core/4-thread chip is now selling for USD $97, a 20 percent cut from its $122 MSRP.

Other noteworthy cuts include the popular Core i5-9400F 6-core/6-thread processor, which is now going for $157, compared to its $182 original price. This chip has seen sub-$160 pricing in promotional sales on popular e-tailers such as Newegg. The Core i7-9700F and i7-9700KF are the other popular SKUs among the premium gaming PC build crowd. The two 8-core/8-thread chips are now priced at $298 and $349, respectively. Leading the pack is the Core i9-9900KF, which is going for $463, a small 5% saving over the i9-9900K which you can spend elsewhere, such as slightly faster RAM.

In more evidence of AMD having finally achieved or exceeded IPC parity with Intel, a mid-range Ryzen 5 3600 processor beats Intel's current mainstream-desktop flagship processor, the Core i9-9900KF, at the PassMark - CPU Mark single-thread benchmark. The official performance chart for PassMark shows the Ryzen 5 3600 leading the pack, with 2,981 points, a score which is 1.77 percent higher than that of the Core i9-9900KF on the same chart. It also beats the Core i9-9900K by 2.86 percent. Interestingly, the chart does not mention whether the Ryzen 5 3600 is running at its stock frequency of 3.60 GHz with 4.20 GHz boost, or whether it's overclocked. The i9-9900KF boosts to 5.00 GHz. For a single-threaded benchmark, it's generally assumed that the maximum boost multiplier is engaged on both chips. The score can't be dismissed due to this uncertainty, either, because AMD achieving a 1-2 percent IPC uplift over "Skylake" (fine, "Coffee Lake,") isn't impossible given the leaps the company made in the past three years.

Intel has been playing with the release of multiple of their 14 nm ++ processors without any integrated graphics tech, such as the Intel Core i5-9400F, or the iGPU-less, unlocked Core i9-9900KF. However, as strange as it may seem, a quick look online still shows the i9-9900KF selling for more ($582.50) than its complete i9-9900 sibling.

The Core i9-9900F, as caught in SiSoft's Sandra, is likely simply a locked-down version of Intel's Core i9-9900, since delidding of Intel's Core i5-9400F has shown that the silicon real-estate for the iGPU is still there - as such, this likely isn't an effort from Intel to reduce the silicon used for graphics and pass on the savings to customers. At the most, this is Intel launching products that may carry defective iGPUs from the production process and still be able to sell them - though Intel does seem to be looking not to budge on its profit margin, even on these "crippled" CPUs.

Intel will be relasing IPG-less versions of their most popular desktop processors soon, if some retailers' listings of the CPUs are anything to go by. The i9-9900KF and i7-9700KF CPUs will bring about Intel's best-performing architecture to date in an integrated GPU-less package, which will allow the company to bring prices down for the end user. Of course, this has all the hallmarks of a bid for a more competitive positioning of its products against AMD's upcoming Zen 2 products, whilst simultaneously (and likely) increasing profit on every processor sold (we'd expect the savings passed on to the customer to be inferior to Intel's saved costs at the foundry level).

The i9-9900KF has been found online for $582.50, more than $50 above the i9-9900K's $530 street pricing, while the 9600KF is listed at $308.75, more than $60 over the street pricing of Intel's i7-9600K. Remember that these prices are gouged on account of limited availability on the market; when these are more widespread and the market sees stocks in line with demand expectations, these should bottom down. But then again, we've seen Intel's products being price-increased for a while as the company struggled to keep its production up to the demand, amidst a constrained and supposedly already second-line 14 nm process.