Intel's Core "Tiger Lake" microarchitecture could be a point of transition between DDR4 and DDR5 for the company. Prototypes of devices based on the ultra-compact "Tiger Lake-Y" SoC were earlier shown featuring LPDDR4X memory, although a new device, possibly a prototyping platform, in the regulatory queue with the Eurasian Economic Commission describes itself as featuring a "Tiger Lake-U" chip meant for thin and light notebooks and convertibles. This device features newer LPDDR5 memory, according to its regulatory filing.

LPDDR5 succeeds LPDDR4X as the industry's next low-power memory standard, offering data-rates of up to 6,400 MT/s (versus up to 4,266 MT/s of LPDDR4X), and consumes up to 30 percent less power. This prototype at the EEC is sure to be using unreleased LPDDR5 memory chips as DRAM majors Samsung and SK Hynix plan to ship their DDR5-based memory solutions only by the end of this year, although mass-production of the chips have already started at Samsung, in PoP form-factors. A successor to the 10th generation Core "Ice Lake," "Tiger Lake" will be Intel's second CPU microarchitecture designed for its 10 nm silicon fabrication node.

TSMC has been very aggressive with its approach to silicon manufacturing, with more investments into its R&D that now match or beat the capex investments of Intel. That indicates a strong demand for new technologies and TSMC's strong will not drop out of the never-ending race for more performance and smaller node sizes.

According to the sources over at DigiTimes, TSMC has acquired as much as 30 hectares of land in the Southern Taiwan Science Park to begin the construction of its fabs that are supposed to start high-volume manufacturing 3 nm node in 2023. Construction of 3 nm manufacturing facilities are set to begin in 2020 when TSMC will lay the groundwork for the new fab. The 3 nm semiconductor node is expected to be TSMC's third attempt at EUV lithography, right after the 7 nm+, and 5 nm nodes which are also based on EUV technology.

In a bid to clear out inventories of its 7th and 9th generation Core X HEDT processors based on the "Skylake-X" silicon, Intel is preparing to halve prices of leftover inventory in the retail channel. The move is triggered by the company's own recent launch of the 10th generation Core i9 "Cascade Lake-X" processors that are compatible with existing socket LGA2066 motherboards. With "Cascade Lake-X," Intel halved the Dollars-per-core metric across the board (i.e. doubled the performance-per-Dollar), resulting in its top 18-core i9-10980XE being priced under the $1000-mark, half of what the i9-9980XE once commanded.

With prices of Core X "Skylake-X" chips being halved, you can expect the market to be flooded with 7th and 9th generation chips that are priced marginally lesser than their 10th gen "Cascade Lake-X" siblings. The single-thread performance (IPC) is identical between the three generations. All that's changed with "Cascade Lake-X" is the introduction of the DLBoost instruction-set that speeds up AI applications (irrelevant to gamers), and an improved Turbo Boost algorithm that spreads boost clocks across more cores, including Favored Cores capability that will come alive with Windows 10 2H19 update. If you've been on one of the cheaper 8-core or 10-core LGA2066 chips, your upgrade options just increased.

Intel filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Fortress Investment Group, a firm owned by Japan's SoftBank, over alleged malpractices with their patents. Intel alleges that the company stockpiled patents to make a living out of IP disputes with other companies, including Intel. The complaint filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose alleges that Fortress bought up over 1,000 U.S. technology patents, some of which include patents from NXP Semiconductors. It's now using these patents to get Intel to pay up a royalty on every processor sold since 2011. SoftBank bought Fortress in 2017 for USD $3.3 billion as part of a massive takeover of the tech world. One of SoftBank's other priced possessions include ARM.

The lawsuit alleges a motive behind Fortress's behavior. "One way in which Fortress has tried to turn around its performance and justify SoftBank's investment in it is through increased speculation on patent assertions," the lawsuit says. Intel accused Fortress of patent-trolling, alleging that the company's move to soak up tech patents constitutes anti-competitive behavior as it's driven by the idea that the patents would cost less than what other tech companies would pay up to avert an IP lawsuit.

There were many rumors about Intel's 10 nm CPUs, many of them indicating that Intel will not manufacture 10 nm CPUs for desktop users, due to the 10 nm manufacturing process being in a bad shape. Those rumors were later countered by Intel, claiming that 10 nm is doing very well on improving yields and that we will see desktop CPUs based on the new node very soon.

Thanks to the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML), we now know that support for Ice Lake desktop and server CPUs has been added. A Patch titled "Add more CPU model number for Ice Lake" has many details about variants of Ice Lake with names like Ice Lake X for server Xeon CPU, Ice Lake D for Xeon D CPUs, Ice Lake L for mobile, and regular Ice Lake for desktop series of CPUs. This confirms Intel's claims that Ice Lake is on its way to desktop and server users in the near future. Possible launch date on these CPUs would be sometime in 2020, when Xe graphics cards are launched in July/August, so Intel could bundle both processors on the same 10 nm node.

Intel is preparing to debut its next generation Pentium Silver and Celeron "Gemini Lake Refresh" low-power processors in November 2019. The latest company roadmap slide detailing low-power SoC rollout, sourced by FanlessTech, pinned their launch sometime between week 45-47 (November). These are two key variants of this silicon, J and N. The J variant targets low-power desktops and AIOs, while the N variant targets notebooks, tablets, and other portables.

"Gemini Lake Refresh" SoCs are built on Intel's latest 14 nm node, and pack up to four "Goldmont Plus" CPU cores, and the same Intel UHD graphics, but offer significantly higher clock-speeds on both the CPU cores and the iGPU. Leading the pack is the Pentium Silver J5040, clocked at 2.00 GHz with up to 3.20 GHz boost. This chip succeeds the J5005, which ticks at 1.50 GHz with 2.80 GHz boost. The table below details the other J and N series models with the clock-speeds and core-counts.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9 3950X socket AM4 processor beats Intel's flagship 18-core processor, the Core i9-10980XE, by a staggering 24 percent at 3DMark Physics, according to a PC Perspective report citing TUM_APISAK. The 3950X is a 16-core/32-thread processor that's drop-in compatible with any motherboard that can run the Ryzen 9 3900X. The i9-10980XE is an 18-core/36-thread HEDT chip that enjoys double the memory bus width as the AMD chip, and is based on Intel's "Cascade Lake-X" silicon. The AMD processor isn't at a tangible clock-speed advantage. The 3950X has a maximum boost frequency of 4.70 GHz, while the i9-10980XE isn't much behind, at 4.60 GHz, but things differ with all-core boost.

When paired with 16 GB of dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory, the Ryzen 9 3950X powered machine scores 32,082 points in the CPU-intensive physics tests of 3DMark. In comparison, the i9-10980XE, paired with 32 GB of quad-channel DDR4-2667 memory, scores just 25,838 points as mentioned by PC Perspective. Graphics card is irrelevant to this test. It's pertinent to note here that the 3DMark physics test scales across practically any number of CPU cores/threads, and the AMD processor could be benefiting from a higher all-core boost frequency than the Intel chip. Although AMD doesn't mention a number in its specifications, the 3950X is expected to have an all-core boost frequency that's north of 4.00 GHz, as its 12-core sibling, the 3900X, already offers 4.20 GHz all-core. In contrast, the i9-10980XE has an all-core boost frequency of 3.80 GHz. This difference in boost frequency, apparently, even negates the additional 2 cores and 4 threads that the Intel chip enjoys, in what is yet another example of AMD having caught up with Intel in the IPC game.

According to the sources close to DigiTimes, Intel will unveil its first discrete 10 nm graphics cards named "Xe" very soon, with the first wave of Xe GPUs expected to arrive some time in 2020. Said to launch mid year, around July or August, Intel will start selling initial Xe GPU models of the long awaited product to consumers, in hope of gaining a share in the massive market using GPU for acceleration of all kinds of tasks.

Perhaps one of the most interesting notes DigiTimes reported is that "... Intel's GPUs have already received support from the upstream supply chain and has already been integrated into Intel's CPUs to be used in the datacenter and AI fields.", meaning that AIB partners already have access to first 10 nm graphics chips that are ready for system integration. First generation of Xe graphics cards will cover almost whole GPU market, including PC, datacenter, and AI applications where NVIDIA currently holds the top spot.

Microsoft started deploying microcode updates to some of Intel's older Core, Pentium, and Celeron processor generations through Windows Update. The latest Cumulative Update packages chronicled under "KB4497165" apply to machines running Intel's 4th generation Core "Haswell" processors, and low-power Pentium and Celeron chips based on "Apollo Lake," "Gemini Lake," "Valley View," and "Cherry View" microarchitectures.

The microcode update provides firmware-level hardening against four major variants of the MDS class of security vulnerabilities, namely CVE-2019-11091 (MDS Uncacheable Memory), CVE-2018-12126 (Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data Sampling), CVE-2018-12127 (Microarchitectural Load Port Data Sampling), and CVE-2018-12130 (Microarchitectural Fill Buffer Data Sampling).

Intel has been very serious about its efforts in computer graphics lately, mainly because of its plans to launch a dedicated GPU lineup and bring new features to the graphics card market. Today, Intel and Wargaming, a maker of MMO titles like World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes, partnered to bring ray tracing feature to the Wargaming's "Core" graphics engine, used in perhaps one of the best-known MMO title - World of Tanks.

Joint forces of Intel and Wargaming developers have lead to the implementation of ray tracing, using only regular software techniques without a need for special hardware. Being hardware agnostic, this implementation works on any graphics card that can run DirectX 11, as the "Core" engine is written in DirectX 11 API. To achieve this, developers had to make a solution that uses CPU's resources for fast, multi-threaded bounding volume hierarchy which then feeds the GPU's compute shaders for ray tracing processing, thus making the ray tracing feature entirely GPU shader/core dependent. Many features are reworked with emphasis put on shadow quality. In the images below you can see exactly what difference the new ray-tracing implementation makes, and you can use almost any graphics card to get it. Wargaming notes that "some FPS" will be sacrificed if ray tracing is turned on, so your GPU shouldn't struggle too much.

Following the success of their Touchaqua-branded Summit MS OLED CPU block earlier this year, which was for Intel platforms only at that time, Bitspower have decided to add the OLED display to their main brand in the form of the new Summit M CPU water block. The design is a departure from the squared-off Summit MS, with a smaller form factor that also increases CPU socket compatibility to the red camp out of the box. The OLED display is housed on a metal top plate, with an acrylic body enabling side views of the coolant, a temperature sensor enabling readout on the display, as well as the integrated dRGB LEDs for lighting options compatible with ASUS AURA Sync, GIGABYTE RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock Polychrome.

The cooling engine uses a nickel-plated copper base plate, with 0.3 mm CNC-machined fins and microchannels that are part of a split central-inlet flow promising high coolant flow directly over the fins to remove as much heat from the CPU as possible. This is similar to the vast majority of CPU block designs in practice, but manufacturers tend to experiment with the flow schematic to see if they can do better, so time will tell how the Summit M fares on the TechPowerUp test bench. In the meantime, it is available for direct purchase from the Bitspower store for 4500 NTD (~$150 USD) before any applicable taxes and shipping costs.

In a shocking piece of news, Intel has reportedly scrapped plans to launch its 10 nm "Ice Lake" microarchitecture on the client desktop platform. The company will confine its 10 nm microarchitectures, "Ice Lake" and "Tiger Lake" to only the mobile platform, while the desktop platform will see derivatives of "Skylake" hold Intel's fort under the year 2022! Intel gambles that with HyperThreading enabled across the board and increased clock-speeds, it can restore competitiveness with AMD's 7 nm "Zen 2" Ryzen processors with its "Comet Lake" silicon that offers core-counts of up to 10.

"Comet Lake" will be succeeded in 2021 by the 14 nm "Rocket Lake" silicon, which somehow combines a Gen12 iGPU with "Skylake" derived CPU cores, and possibly increased core-counts and clock speeds over "Comet Lake." It's only 2022 that Intel will ship out a truly new microarchitecture on the desktop platform, with "Meteor Lake." This chip will be built on Intel's swanky 7 nm EUV silicon fabrication node, and possibly integrate CPU cores more advanced than even "Willow Cove," possibly "Golden Cove."

Intel has finalized design of its next-generation Xeon Scalable enterprise CPU socket for its "Sapphire Rapids" processors. Called LGA4677, the socket succeeds LGA3647, and is bound for a 2021 market release. Intel will have transitioned to its advanced 7 nm EUV silicon fabrication node on the CPU front, and has adopted an "enterprise-first" strategy for the node. LGA4677 will be designed to handle the extremely high bandwidth of PCI-Express Gen 5, which doubles bandwidth over PCIe gen 4.0, and adds several enterprise-specific features Intel is rolling out in advance as part of its CXL interconnect. These details, along with a prototype LGA4189 socket, was revealed at an exhibit by TE Connectivity, a company that manufactures the socket. The additional pin-count could enable Intel to not just deploy PCI-Express Gen 5, but also expand I/O in other directions, such as more memory channels, dedicated Persistent Memory I/O, etc.

Intel's 10th generation Core desktop processor lineup, based on the 14 nm "Comet Lake" silicon, will begin with the Core i3-10100 succeeding the Core i3-9100 and i3-8100. To squeeze the most out of the microarchitecture that's essentially identical to "Skylake," Intel has decided to enable HyperThreading across the Core processor family, which means the i3-10100 is a 4-core/8-thread chip. Interestingly, Intel has given it just 6 MB of shared L3 cache. It's likely that the slightly beefed up i3-103xx will be differentiated with 8 MB of L3 cache. The chip has the same 3.60 GHz nominal frequency, and an unknown degree of Turbo Boost. The current-gen i3-9100 features Turbo Boost, so it's likely that its successor will also get the feature.

A SiSoft SANDRA online database entry for the i3-10100 surfaced, where it has an overall score of 382.61 MPix/s using multimedia tests, a significal step up from the roughly 290 MPix/s of the i3-9100 (a 31 percent performance increase). This increase in performance can be attributed to HyperThreading, as SANDRA's multimedia tests leverage it efficiently. Intel is expected to launch the Core i3-10100 around the $120 mark, competing with AMD's Ryzen 3 3200G.

TUM_APISAK has done of his well-regarded snoopings again, and this one could have relevant information for the democratization of threads in next-gen Intel products. Intel has been slowly (as they can) increasing the amount of cores and threads in their respective product lines across i3, i5, and i7 CPUs after AMD's Ryzen onslaught. Luckily, from two core, four-thread Core i3 of a few years ago, we now seem to be entering a new era for entry-level computing, with a new SiSoftware benchmark seemingly showing an Intel next-gen "Comet Lake" Core i3 CPU sporting 4 physical threads with Hyper Threading enabled (so, basically, the equivalent of Skylake Core i7's from just three years ago).

The benchmark submission lists what appears to be a four-core, eight-thread Core i3-10100. It sports a 3.6 GHz base clock, which likely isn't final, so take that frequency with a grain of salt. This shuffle in the low-end definitely means an upscale in Intel's more powerful lineups, with HyperThreading likely being active for all of their product stack across Comet Lake - 4C, 8T Core i3; 6C, 12T Core i5; 8C, 16T Core i7; and a likely 10C, 20T Core i9 10900K that straddles the line between consumer and HEDT platforms. Of course, remember these are still built upon the 14 nm process, give or take a few "+" symbols, so don't expect too much in terms of energy efficiency gains.

Intel late Thursday, through a product change notification, announced the discontinuation of almost its entire 7th generation Core "Kaby Lake" desktop processor series. This includes most chips across the Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, Pentium, and Celeron desktop chips based on the 14 nm+ "Kaby Lake-S" silicon, across both retail boxed and tray packages. These chips formed Intel's main product lineup through 2017, and had to be quickly succeeded by the 8th generation "Coffee Lake" with the advent of AMD Ryzen. To clear out its inventory, Intel will accept discontinuance orders for these chips until April 2020. A discontinuance order can only be placed by a customer who has previously ordered these exact chips. The last of these orders will be shipped out by October 2020.

Intel's Omni-Path technology has been used primarily in high performance computing market, in order to provide high speed interconnect between Intel Xeon CPUs, with speeds reaching around 100 Gbps. Accompanied by different design and system integration that Omni-Path uses, it was a bit difficult to integrate into server system, while not adding much value that other technologies couldn't match or beat.

Because of these reasons, Intel is now discontinuing its last product capable of utilizing Omni-Path - the first generation Xeon Scalable CPUs. Carrying the suffix "F", these CPUs had an extra connector sticking out of CPU's PCB to enable the Omni-Path functionality (see images bellow). There were eight CPUs manufactured in total that had this extra feature, consisting out of two Xeon Platinum and six Xeon Gold CPUs, which have now reached end of life. Intel states that focus from these CPUs has shifted to other technologies like silicon photonics, which provides much greater speed reaching 100s of gigabits per second. Intel already demonstrated transceivers capable of reaching 400 Gb/s speeds with the magic of light, which will become available in 1H 2020.

Intel at the Intel Developer Conference 'IDC' 2019 in Tokyo revealed their performance projections for mobility Xe GPUs, which will supersede their current consumer-bound UHD620 graphics under the Gen 11 architecture. The company is being vocal in that they can achieve an up to 2x performance uplift over their previous generation - but that will likely only take place in specific scenarios, and not as a rule of thumb. Just looking at Intel's own performance comparison graphics goes to show that we're mostly looking at between 50% and 70% performance improvements in popular eSports titles, which are, really, representative of most of the gaming market nowadays.

The objective is to reach above 60 FPS in the most popular eSports titles, something that Gen 11 GPUs didn't manage with their overall IPC and dedicated die-area. We've known for some time that Intel's Xe (as in, exponential) architecture will feature hardware-based raytracing, and the architecture is being developed for scalability that goes all the way from iGPUs to HPC platforms.

The upcoming single-player Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order will be a tall calling for Respawn. Few franchises are as loved as Star Wars, and this one will definitely leave a mark in the company's legacy. It's unlikely EA will "pull an EA" on the studio even if it flops, though: Apex Legends remains an incredibly successful release form Respawn Entertainment, and it should be enough to hold EA's reins - at least for a while.

The system requirements for the highly-awaited, story-driven single-player game have been outed, and they're in the usual side of things. Minimum requirements call for an AMD FX-6100 or an Intel Core i3-3220, paired with 8 GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 7750 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 - alongside 65 GB of storage. The recommended specs are relatively standard as well, and nothing to throw users in an upgrade fit... We're looking at an AMD AMD Ryzen 7 1700 or an Intel i7-6700K, 16 GB of system RAM, An AMD RX Vega 56 or NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics cards. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order drops on November 15th.

The marriage of Intel and AMD IPs in the form of the Kaby Lake-G processors was met with both surprised grunts from the company and a sense of bewilderment at what could come next. Well, we now know what came next: Intel hiring several high-level AMD employees on the graphics space and putting together its own motley crew of discrete GPU developers, who should be putting out Intel's next-gen high-performance graphics accelerators sometime next year.

The Kaby Lake-G processors, however, showed promise, pairing both Intel's (at the time) IPC dominance and AMD's graphics IP performance and expertise on a single package by placing the two components in the same substrate and connecting them via a PCIe link. A new and succinct Intel notice on the Kaby Lake-G page sets a last order time (January 31, 2020, as the last date for orders, and July 31, 2020, as the date of last shipments), and explains that product market shifts have moved demand from Kaby Lake-G products "to other Intel products". Uptake was always slow on this particular collaboration - most of it, we'd guess, because of the chips' strange footprint arrangement for embedding in systems, which required custom solutions that had to be designed from scratch. And with Intel investing into their own high-performance graphics, it seems clear that there is just no need to flaunt their previous collaborations with other companies in this field. Farewell, Intel-AMD Kaby Lake-G. We barely knew you.

Yesterday Intel hosted an event in London, where it held a presentation and demonstration of new concept product. Simply called "The Element", this new products tries to introduce the concept of modular computing, where you can basically swap out parts and replace them with ease, to users of PCs who wanted this to happen for a long time.

If anyone remembers Razer's project Christine, which unfortunately didn't take off, this product should be of no surprise to them. The Element is a complete PC consisting out of CPU, RAM and Storage, with a PCIe slot attached to it. Featuring plenty of IO options like Thunderbolt, HDMI, Ethernet, USB, and Wi-Fi, The Element is a complete solution for computing. For the demo Intel soldered a BGA Xeon CPU with room for two SODIMM slots for memory and two M.2 ports for storage expansion, all cooled by a blower fan directly cooling the CPU heatsink. Power is supplied from PCIe slot (75 Watts) and 8 pin connector which would come from a regular PSU. There is also an option for the card to be powered by a 19 V power source if external power brick is provided.

Intel Monday revised prices of select 9th generation Core "Coffee Lake Refresh" desktop processor models. These price cuts target the "F" and "KF" brand extensions, which denote a lack of integrated graphics. The price cuts range from 5 percent to 20 percent, and cover key fast-moving SKUs popular with the DIY gaming PC crowd that likes to pair these chips with discrete graphics cards. The entry-level Core i3-9100F gets the biggest cut of the lot. The 4-core/4-thread chip is now selling for USD $97, a 20 percent cut from its $122 MSRP.

Other noteworthy cuts include the popular Core i5-9400F 6-core/6-thread processor, which is now going for $157, compared to its $182 original price. This chip has seen sub-$160 pricing in promotional sales on popular e-tailers such as Newegg. The Core i7-9700F and i7-9700KF are the other popular SKUs among the premium gaming PC build crowd. The two 8-core/8-thread chips are now priced at $298 and $349, respectively. Leading the pack is the Core i9-9900KF, which is going for $463, a small 5% saving over the i9-9900K which you can spend elsewhere, such as slightly faster RAM.

There is no correlation between CPU frequency boosting behavior and system stability. Intel today launched its "10th generation" Core X HEDT processors, with core-counts ranging between 10 to 18, priced between $590 and $978. Based on the 14 nm "Cascade Lake-X" silicon, these chips have the same exact IPC as "Skylake" circa 2015, but offer nearly double the number of cores to the Dollar compared to the 9th generation Core X series; and add a couple of useful instruction sets such as DLBoost, which accelerates DNN training/building; a few more AVX-512 instructions, and an updated Turbo Boost Max 3.0 algorithm. The chips offer clock-speed bumps over the previous generation.

Intel's main trade-call for these processors? Taking another stab at AMD for falling short on boost frequency in the hands of consumers. "The chip that hits frequency benchmarks as promised, our new #CoreX -series processor, provides a stable, high-performance platform for visual creators everywhere," reads the Intel tweet, as if to suggest that reaching the "promised" clock speed results in stability. AMD was confronted with alarming statistics of consumers whose 3rd generation Ryzen processors wouldn't reach their advertised boost frequencies. The company released an updated AGESA microcode that fixed this.

Intel today unveiled its latest lineup of Intel Xeon W and X-series processors, which puts new classes of computing performance and AI acceleration into the hands of professional creators and PC enthusiasts. Custom-designed to address the diverse needs of these growing audiences, the new Xeon W-2200 and X-series processors are targeted to be available starting November, along with a new pricing structure that represents an easier step up for creators and enthusiasts from Intel Core S-series mainstream products.

Intel is the only company that delivers a full portfolio of products precision-tuned to handle the sustained compute-intensive workloads used by professional creators and enthusiasts every day. The new Xeon W-2200 and X-series processors take this to the next level, as the first high-end desktop PC and mainstream workstations to feature AI acceleration with the integration of Intel Deep Learning Boost. This offers an AI inference boost of 2.2 times more compared with the prior generation. Additionally, this new lineup features Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0, which has been further enhanced to help software, such as for simulation and modeling, run as fast as possible by identifying and prioritizing the fastest available cores.

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.