Both Intel and AMD are prepping their next-gen HEDT chips for launch in October. Team blue with the Cascade Lake-X lineup and red with the 3rd Gen Threadrippers packing as many as 64 cores. While the former will be once again based on the 14nm node and the same Skylake core as all of Intel’s other offerings in the last 4-5 years, the latter is expected to leverage the brand new 7nm Zen 2 cores.
Today, we have a Geekbench listing of an 18 core Cascade Lake-X part to share which gives us an idea of what to expect from Intel’s newer HEDT offerings. Although it’s more of the same, it indicates that big blue hasn’t given up just yet and is set to compete with Zen 2 albeit crippled with a
Comparing the newer Cascade Lake-X part to the existing Core i9-9980XE, it seems to be a minor upgrade with marginal gains. In the single-threaded score, the latest 14nm iteration is a negligible 3% faster while in multi-threaded workloads promises close to a double-digit improvement.
Intel Cascade Lake-X Specs
Looking at the specs of the two CPUs, it’s clear that this is an early sample as it’s running at a lower frequency compared to its predecessor. As such, we can expect steeper performance gains, with perhaps an increase in the TDP as well. The PCIe lanes and DRAM channels should remain unchanged, and although we might see the top-end product with additional cores, the existing ones will have to be satiated with minor frequency gains.
The Cascade
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