One of the first reviews of Intel's new flagship HEDT processor, the Core i9-10980XE, just hit the web. Lab501.ro got their hands on a freshly minted i9-10980XE and put it through their test bench. Based on the "Cascade Lake-X" silicon, the i9-10980XE offers almost identical IPC to "Skylake-X," but succeeds the older generation with AI-accelerating DLBoost instruction-set, an improved multi-core boosting algorithm, higher clock speeds, and most importantly, a doubling in price-performance achieved by cutting the cores-per-Dollar metric by half, across the board.

Armed with 18 cores, the i9-10980XE is ahead of the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X in rendering and simulation tests, although not by much (for a chip that has 50% more cores). This is probably attributed to the competing AMD chip being able to sustain higher all-core boost clock speeds. In tests that not only scale with cores, but are also hungry for memory bandwidth, such as 7-zip and Media, Intel extends its lead thanks to its quad-channel memory interface that's able to feed its cores with datasets faster.

Ahead of their October 7th product launch and November availability, we have confirmation of the specifications and pricing of Intel's 10th generation Core X "Cascade Lake-X" HEDT processors in the LGA2066 package. These chips feature compatibility with existing socket LGA2066 motherboards with a UEFI BIOS update, although several motherboard manufacturers are launching new products with some of the latest connectivity options, such as 2.5 GbE wired Ethernet, and 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 WLAN.

The 10th generation Core X HEDT processor family is based on the new 14 nm++ "Cascade Lake" silicon, which comes with hardware fixes against several classes side-channel vulnerabilities, and introduces an updated instruction-set that includes more AVX-512 instructions, and the new DLBoost instruction. DLBoost leverages new fixed-function hardware on silicon to accelerate AI deep-learning neural-set building and training by up to 5 times. Intel's first wave of 10th gen Core X lineup is rather slim, with just four processor models. The company did away with the Core i7 brand extension, as core-counts in the mainstream desktop segment have already reached 8-core. The lineup now begins at 10-core/20-thread, with the chip's full 48-lane PCI-Express and 4-channel DDR4 interfaces enabled across the board. All models feature the "XE" brand extension, and feature unlocked base-clock multipliers.

Intel's upcoming Extreme Edition Core i9-10980XE from the Cascade Lake-X family. Cascade Lake-X (CSL-X) will be Intel's next take on the High End Desktop (HEDT) systems. The Core i9-10980XE is pegged as the flagship on that lineup, sporting an 18-core, 36-thread design, and are still based on Intel's 14 nm process node. These processors will be pin-compatible with Intel's LGA 2066 platform. Caches are expected to be set at 1.125 MB, 18 MB and 24.75 MB of L1, L2 and L3.

Base clocks set in the Geekbench 4 entry are set at 4.1 GHz, with a maximum boost of 4.7 GHz. That's a lot of frequency on a 14 nm CPU with 18 cores; if previous entries on the Intel HEDT family (such as the i9-9980XE) sported a 165 W TDP with clocks of 3.0 GHz and 4.4 GHz respectively, it seems highly unlikely that Intel will keep the same TDP for the i9-10980XE - and even if they do, power consumption will certainly be higher. Those reported clocks for the i9-10980XE may not be right, however - we don't know the conditions of the test run.