Cascade Lake-X Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.techpowerup.com/261574/intel...erclocking

Intel is readying a microcode update specially for its X299 Express chipset, to enhance the overclocking capabilities of its 10th generation Core i9 XE "Cascade Lake-X" processors. News of the update was put out in an MSI press release that speaks of the company encapsulating the new microcode in BIOS updates for its entire socket LGA2066 motherboard lineup.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/int...-10980xe/6

Intel's tactic of slowly bumping up clock speeds and adding more features across its product stack, like Hyper-Threading, has proven to be a good-enough strategy to fend off AMD's increasing pressure with the first-gen Zen chips, but the arrival of Zen 2 and the 7nm process blow that approach out of the water. It's quite shocking to see Intel thoroughly unprepared to attack AMD's high end Threadripper parts, and we're not convinced that bringing the high core count Xeon W parts down to the standard HEDT segment would help.

Intel says it will have 10nm parts for the desktop soon, but we don't know where those products will land yet, and they certainly won't attack the HEDT market for at least another year, meaning the company has ceded the high end to AMD.

So what's left? Competing on price by dropping Cascade Lake-X pricing roughly 50% across the entire stack, thus dealing with AMD's lesser-equipped processors. That does improve Intel's value proposition, but AMD still looms large.

The refined 14nm process equates to faster clocks speeds, and thus performance, at lower overall power consumption. The Core i9-10980XE also has much higher overclocking headroom than its predecessor, but Intel's textbook incrementalism is no longer enough to fend off AMD in the 7nm Zen 2 era.