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Intel's Cascade Lake-X CPU for High-End Desktops: 18 cores for Under $1000
With someone in the press having broken their embargo earlier today, Intel is lifting the lid earlier than planned on their upcoming Cascade Lake-X family of processors for the high-end desktop (HEDT) market. Similar to the way Intel's Cascade Lake based Xeon Scalable processors are a further revision of their Skylake Xeons, offering clock speed increases and security fixes in hardware, the new HEDT processors will grant higher frequencies, more memory capacity, and better protection against side-channel attacks. The key numbers however are the big drop in Intel's pricing: Intel will be releasing its 18-core part, the Core i9-10980XE, for under $1000.
This pricing is a significant shift in Intel's strategy, and a number of fingers will be pointed at AMD as having made this happen. Next month AMD is set to launch its 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X at $749, which will offer 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes for slots (+4 for M.2, +4 for chipset) and support for 128 GB of DRAM. So Intel needed something similarly speedy, but with more PCIe lanes and more memory support that they could offer for just a bit more, leading to the 10980XE for $979. Ultimately, the on-shelf price is often just slightly higher than tray price, so don't be surprised if retail prices land at around $1000.
All the CPUs will support 256 GB of quad-channel memory (up from 128 GB), and have 48 PCIe 3.0 lanes (up from 44). Memory speed support is listed as DDR4-2933 for 1 DIMM per channel, and DDR4-2666 for 2 DIMMs per channel. All these CPUs have a TDP of 165 W, which Intel states will help the CPUs to turbo longer under Intel's recommended settings (as we know, consumer motherboard manufacturers like to ignore these anyway). All these CPUs are supported in X299 motherboards.
No 16-core part in the lineup, but there are 14 and 18 cores.
Related: 16-Core Ryzen 9 3950X and 24-core Threadripper 3 Will Launch in November
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday October 02 2019, @12:57AM (2 children)
It's funny that they won't have a 16-core that can be directly compared to AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X.
It's possible that the Cascade Lake-X chips won't beat Ryzen 3000-series core for core on multicore performance, e.g. 12-core Intel Core i9-10920X vs. 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 3900X [techradar.com].
That would be $689 vs. $500, except that there are CPU shortages and prices higher than MSRP for the 3900X:
https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-cpu-shortage-800-usd-pricing-major-retailers/ [wccftech.com]
https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-cpu-remains-hard-to-buy-with-prices-now-seriously-jacked-up-as-a-result [techradar.com]
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-price-increase,40494.html [tomshardware.com]
And of course, the 3950X was supposed to come out day(s) ago but now is delayed to November.
AMD does have plenty of options going forward. They probably don't need to lower prices that much if they are beating Cascade Lake-X in multicore performance, there is a cheaper 12-core Ryzen 9 3900 with a lower TDP coming, and Threadripper 3 will be a much better buy than Intel HEDT. Finally, they will likely pull Zen 3 out of their pocket next year.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @07:17PM (1 child)
Are you comparing pre or post mitigation? Because a huge part of intel's performance was attained by trading off security.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday October 02 2019, @07:48PM
Summary says Cascade Lake-X has "security fixes in hardware" and "better protection against side-channel attacks".
I guess if you look at Intel's marketing materials saying "Cascade Lake-X is Y% better than Skylake-X", you can ask how much of that increase is from hardware security fixes.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]