A Tale Of Two Chips; Intel’s Story
Cascade Lake-X Hits The Stage
The Core i9-10980XE has arrived, with a change in price as well as performance. For many knocking around $1000 off the historic price for this level of processor is the biggest and most appreciated change, but performance matters too! Kitguru takes a look at 18 cores and 36 threads with base clocks of 3.0GHz, 4.8GHz Turbo, and a maximum all-core frequency of 3.8GHz. This of course makes it an interesting processor to describe quickly, and the previous leaves out the fact there are two versions of Turbo Boost at the moment, with 4.6GHz being the peak if you only have Turbo Boost 2.0!
The tests show the new chip can beat the previous Core i9-9980XE when all cores are not saturated thanks to the higher peak frequencies, and match it when you are going on all cores. It competes directly with the Ryzen 9 3950X, winning some tests and losing others so in many cases what this comes down to are the features. Are you willing to pay an extra ~$230 for a bunch of extra PCIe lanes, quad channel memory support and AVX-512 or DL Boost, or do you prefer AMD’s lower price and power consumption?
Interesting times folks, interesting times.
Intel’s new Cascade Lake-X processors have launched for the X299 HEDT platform, with the new flagship Core i9-10980XE featuring a huge price reduction to $979 MSRP. That $1000 trimming of the ticket price places Intel’s new HEDT line-up in a far stronger position to compete against AMD’s Ryzen and Threadripper offerings.
