Leaked Specs Suggest Intel Will Cut HEDT Cascade Lake-X Pricing By Half
We know that Intel’s next HEDT platform – Cascade Lake-X – will launch in the next few months and, as the still-14nm-based successor to 2017’s Skylake-X (and 2018’s Skylake-X Refresh), we have a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of performance. What we didn’t know is price, something that’s especially important in the wake of stiff competition from AMD, both from the higher-end side of Ryzen 3000 and from the upcoming third-generation Threadripper.
The Cascade Lake-X price question became even more interesting last month at IFA, when Intel released a chart claiming that the impending HEDT processor family would offer up to twice the “relative performance per dollar” over Skylake-X.
With limits to how much Intel can improve performance on its existing 14nm architecture, the likely method for Intel to hit this price-to-performance goal was price cuts. And, according to leaks published today by VideoCardz, that’s exactly what Intel has planned.
After years of seeing prices for Intel’s HEDT platform rise – reaching a list price of $1,979 for last year’s 18-core/36-thread i9-9980XE – competition from AMD may cap Cascade Lake-X at under $1,000. The leaks provided to VideoCardz claim that specs and prices for Cascade Lake-X will start at $590 for 10-cores/20-threads on the i9-10900XE and reach a high of $979 for the 18-core/36-thread i9-10980XE, a 50% reduction over its Skylake-X Refresh counterpart. In fact, the highest-end Cascade Lake-X part will reportedly have a volume list price lower than the lowest-end starting price for Skylake-X Refresh.
Other rumoured improvements include an additional 4 PCIe lanes (PCIe 3.0 only, of course), higher maximum boost clocks up to 4.8GHz (up from 4.5GHz), and support for up to 256GB of DDR4-2933 memory (compared to 128GB of DDR4-2666).
While we have no information about 3rd-gen Threadripper other than the fact that it will “start” at 24 cores, when looking at the high-end of Ryzen 3000, AMD still wins on price if core and thread count are your primary focus. But for those who need more PCIe lanes or for those with workloads that perform better on Intel hardware, this rumoured pricing is a huge improvement and a great win for consumers in this new era of stiff competition in desktop and workstation processors.
VideoCardz claims Intel will officially announce the Cascade Lake-X lineup next Monday, October 7th, with shipments starting in November.
