Intel reveals staggering price drops for their upcoming Cascade Lake-X series CPUs

So let’s get the record straight here. Someone broke the embargo on Intel’s Cascade Lake X series. This information was due to be released on October 7th at 6 AM Pacific Time, but somebody blabbed early. Intel responded by moving the embargo date forward. We were not informed of this until after other sites published. 

Anyway, Cascade Lake-X will be Intel’s next offering for the company’s X299 platform, replacing the company’s Skylake-X 7000 and 9000 series products. While the platform still supports a maximum core count of 18, this release is more than a mere refresh. Cascade Lake-X is new silicon, but don’t expect the architecture itself to be revolutionary in typical PC workloads. 

The main point that needs to be hammered home with this release is that Intel’s pricing has seen a dramatic shift with Cascade Lake-X. Now, 18-core offering costs less than their last-generation 10-core model, delivering 80% more cores for less money. Intel is offering a lot more value with X299 this generation, which is a huge step in the right direction from a consumer’s standpoint. 

When compared to the 18-core i9-9980XE, Intel’s new i9-10980XE will cost $1000 less while offering higher turbo boost frequencies and new, in-silicon, mitigations for side-channel attacks. While this generation won’t offer an insane performance leap over its predecessors, the value for money of Intel’s X299 platform has skyrocketed. 

While this price change is significant, we must note that AMD plans to release a 16-core processor called the Ryzen 9 3950X in November for $749. With this in mind, it is easy to see why Intel has made such drastic price cuts to X299. 

Intel Cascade Lake-X (New)
Â	Cores/Threads	Base Clock	All-Core Boost	Boost 2.0	Boost 3.0	TDP	Price (1K Units)
Core i9-10980XE	18/36	3.0 GHz	3.8 GHz	4.6 GHz	4.8 GHz	165w	$979
Core i9-10940X	14/28	3.3 GHz	4.1 GHz	4.6 GHz	4.8 GHz	165w	$784
Core i9-10920X	12/24	3.5 GHz	4.3 GHz	4.6 GHz	4.8 GHz	165w	$689
Core i9-10900X	10/20	3.7 GHz	4.3 GHz	4.5 GHz	4.7 GHz	165w	$590
Intel Skylake-X (Last-Generation)
Core i9-9980XE	18/36	3.0 GHz	–	4.4	4.5	165w	$1979
Core i9-9960X	16/32	3.1 GHz	–	4.4	4.5	165w	$1684
Core i9-9940X	14/28	3.3 GHz	–	4.4	4.5	165w	$1387
Core i9-9920X	12/24	3.5 GHz	–	4.4	4.5	165w	$1189
Core i9-9900X	10/20	3.5 GHz	–	4.4	4.5	165w	$989

  

With Cascade Lake-X, Intel has also upped their support for both memory speeds and capacities, supporting 2933Mhz memory, in 1 DIMM per channel configs, from 2666MHz and from 128GB maximum to 256GB maximum per socket. The CPUs also support 48 PCIe lanes instead of 44, though these lanes are still PCIe 3.0. 

Intel has also dropped their 16-core X299 CPU from their product stack, believing that there is no place for it within Intel’s new pricing model. This move also prevents direct comparisons to AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X. Intel’s sub-10-core X299 models have also been discontinued, which makes sense given how 8-core CPUs are now relatively common on consumer-grade CPU sockets. 

2.5Gb Ethernet and WiFi 6 support have also been listed for their new Cascade Lake-X processors. To be clear, these features will come with new X299 motherboards, not via the CPU directly. These are external motherboard features that are practically nothing to do with the CPU. COnfusing marketing, but at least this means that there will be new X299 motherboards with a revamped feature set.

One of Cascade Lake’s major architectural changes over Skylake-X is the addition of “Deep Learning Boost”, which can be used to accelerate specific workloads. At this time, it is unknown how many applications will benefit from this feature. Another noteworthy change is that Turbo Boost 3.0 can now be applied to up to four cores, a move which will help grant users additional performance in some workloads.