Intel's new Cascade Lake-X high-end desktop lineup came out this week, and in this case, the performance news comes in second to the price. It costs you almost exactly half as much to buy any given Cascade Lake-X CPU as it would have cost for its Skylake-X counterpart last year, in obvious response to AMD's Threadripper CPUs—and likely in part to the Ryzen 9 3950X, due out in November along with the next generation of Threadrippers.
Skylake-X vs Threadripper 2x
We don't have a firm set of specifications on the third-generation Threadrippers yet, but we can get a quick look at how Cascade-X compares with Threadripper 2000 below:
| Intel CPU Model | Cores / Threads |
Base/ACB Freq |
TDP | Price (1ku) |
AMD CPU Model | Cores / Threads |
Base/ACB Freq |
TDP | Price (retail) |
| i9-10980XE | 18/36 | 3.0GHz/3.8GHz | 165W | $980 | TR 2990WX | 32/64 | 3.0GHz/4.2GHz | 250W | $1,700 |
| i9-10940X | 14/28 | 3.3GHz/4.1GHz | 165W | $785 | TR 2970WX | 24/48 | 3.0GHz/4.2GHz | 250W | $1,220 |
| i9-10920X | 12/24 | 3.5GHz/4.3GHz | 165W | $690 | TR 2950X | 16/32 | 3.0GHz/4.4GHz | 180W | $700 |
| i9-10900X | 10/20 | 3.7GHz/4.3GHz | 165W | $590 | TR 2920X | 12/24 | 3.0GHz/4.3GHz | 180W | $380 |
For one example, this year's high-end i9-10980XE goes for $980—and last year's 9980XE went for just under $2,000. We see roughly the same cost reduction across the board, down to the 10900X at $590 vs last year's 9900X at $990. This takes aim squarely at Threadripper. The interesting question is how AMD will respond with new Threadripper pricing next month; we already know the company at least pretends to enjoy playing elaborate price games.
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