Intel Core i9-9900K has been discontinued, along with other 9th-gen CPUs

(Image credit: Future)

The Intel Core i9-9900K, the last-gen flagship processor, has now officially been discontinued, along with the entire 9th-gen Coffee Lake Refresh range.

The ‘product discontinuance program’ actually kicked off December 7, although the last order date for 9th-gen CPUs doesn’t come until June 25, 2021, with the final shipments happening a year from now, on December 24, 2021.

In other words, Core i9-9900K chips aren’t going to disappear overnight, and will still be available for a while yet. But if you want one, you might want to move sooner rather than later.

Of course, this is a (slightly over) two-year-old chip now, and with the new Rocket Lake range and 8-core flagship processor hopefully about to drop early in 2021, perhaps only a few months away, prospective CPU buyers will quite likely be waiting to see what happens on that front – big things are promised, certainly for gamers.

Real deal potential

However, the Core i9-9900K still remains a great 8-core gaming CPU in itself, offering plenty of power, and the attraction here is the possible deals that might be seen. We’ve already witnessed some mammoth price cuts recently – this processor was reduced by almost 60% for Black Friday, in fact – and we may see similarly juicy bargains when retailers are shifting remaining stock.

And, especially if you can find the Core i9-9900K for cheaper than the Intel Core i7-10700K, it'll definitely be worth picking up. After all, the 10th-gen Core i7 has the same amount of cores and threads, and only a marginally better Turbo Boost. The 9900K will be a top-notch gaming processor for years to come, even if it's now becoming discontinued. 

Intel’s 8th-gen chips were previously discontinued on June 1, 2020, and last orders for those chips rolls around in just over a week, on December 18. If you search hard, you can still find the 8700K here and there online; it has a very scattered presence, but no major retailers are carrying it any longer, unsurprisingly.

Via Wccftech

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).