18 Core Intel Cascade Lake-X CPU Spotted, Beats 32 Core AMD Threadripper 2990WX in SiSoft

Intel’s CPUs have been struggling against AMD’s Zen 2 onslaught lately, especially on the multi-threaded front, where the Ryzen chips have a major advantage. The Ryzen 5 3600 in the mid-range space and the Ryzen 9 3950X in the enthusiast segment have been responsible for most of the damage, offering the kind of performance never seen before in the consumer CPU market, at an unbeatable price. However, Intel hasn’t been sitting idly twiddling its thumbs, the company is expected to slash the prices of the 8th and 9th Gen Coffee Lake processors and the 10nm Ice Lake parts are soon going to relieve the aging 14nm based chips. It’s still going to be at least another year or so before the desktop lineup of the new architecture lands though. Till then, Intel will have to rely on its dated but mature 14nm node to fend off the Ryzen 3000 chips, an uphill task to be sure.

While not exactly a mainstream processor, here above you can see a Cascade Lake-X (Glacier Falls) CPU packing 18 cores and 36 threads. It’s running on a Gigabyte X299G Windforce board indicating that it’ll be an HEDT part for professionals and enthusiasts. These CSL-X chips will fit into the LGA 2066 socket and succeed the Skylake-X lineup and go up against AMD’s Threadrippers. We are talking about the 32 core monstrosities that team red launched last year.

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And look at that, it manages to beat the 32 core Threadripper 2990WX in the multi-media bench. Not that surprising given that the Zen+parts have a lower IPC compared to the Cascade Lake design. However, the gap isn’t that wide and this is just one test. SiSoft also has the “Processor Arithmetic” score of the 18 core CSL-X CPU. Let’s compare the two HEDT processors using the second metric:

As expected, the 32 core Threadripper is quite a bit faster in this test, thanks to all those juicy cores. However, it’s still worth keeping in mind that we’re comparing an 18 core product with a 32 core, despite the fact that they’ll probably be priced the same. Still, the difference is almost 2x in most of the arithmetic tests which is impressive regardless.

Intel is expected to launch the Cascade Lake-X lineup in the coming months at their traditional sky-high pricing. AMD is also working on a 64 core Threadripper based on the 7nm architecture, though we’re not sure if it’ll leverage the Zen 2 or Zen+ architecture. Stay tuned for more processor leaks.

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Further Reading:

• Is the RX 5700XT really 40 percent slower than the 2070 Super?
• Next-Gen Nvidia GPUs will be Fabbed on the 7nm Node by Samsung