The final details and pricing for Intel’s Cascade Lake-X HEDT processors has been revealed. The big news is that Intel will be slashing pricing, by up to 50% in some cases. This is great news as it seems pricing is coming back to what we are used to if you’ve had experience with Intel’s HEDT lineup in the past. Starting with the flagship Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition it will be a 18-core, 36-thread part with a base clock of 3.0 GHz and will boost up to 4.8 GHz. It has 24.75 MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 165W. It is set at $979.
Moving down we have the Core i9-10940X which is a 14-core, 28-thread part with a base clock of 3.3 GHz and a boost clock of 4.8 GHz. It has 19.25 MB of L3 cache and will be priced at $784.
Coming down to the 12-core, 24-thread Core i9-10920X it has a base clock of 3.5 GHz and will boost up to 4.8 GHz with the same 19.25 MB of L3 cache as the i9-10940X. It will be priced at $689.
Finally you have the Core i9-10900X which is a 10-core, 20-thread part with a base clock of 3.7 GHz and will boost up to 4.7 GHz. It also has 19.25 MB of L3 cache and just like all of these parts will have a TDP of 165W. It will be priced at $590.
So as you can see prices are down quite considerably. It is interesting that there is no 16-core part. Total platform PCI-Express lanes has been increased to 72, so all of the CPUs have 48 PCI-Express lanes instead of the normal 44.
The maximum memory supported has been doubled (128GB to 256GB), the memory frequency has been increased to 2933 MHz, and Intel’s Deep Learning ISA has been added as well. All of these chips will be compatible with current X299 motherboards (with a BIOS update), but only new motherboards designed for Cascade Lake-X will be able to utilize the extra four PCI-Express lanes each CPU has.
