Intel’s Cascade-X HEDT squares off with AMD’s Threadripper

[Karlston]

Intel’s Cascade-X HEDT squares off with AMD’s Threadripper

Cascade Lake-X is considerably faster than Skylake-X, at half the cost.

Enlarge / Intel's clearly aiming squarely at AMD's Threadripper with the new Cascade Lake-X price cuts—and the shot lands hard against TR2—but we still don't know what will happen when TR3 lands in November.

Intel Corporation

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.

Enlarge / Intel is taking aim at Threadripper 2 with the new Cascade-X performance and pricing.

Intel Corporation

PCIe 3.0 lanes

Cascade Lake-X CPUs come with 48 PCIe lanes, up from four Skylake-X. But it's still 16 shy of Threadripper 2990WX's 60 lanes. We still don't know how many PCIe lanes Threadripper 3000 CPUs will enjoy, but we feel safe saying it should be at least as many as the 2990WX. If this generation's Threadripper follows the last, TR3 should be essentially a cut-down Epyc Rome lineup, which should either mean 60 lanes again (if it maintains socket compatibility) or 120+ lanes (if it requires a new socket design).

Platform Enhancements

Marketed as "Turbo Boost Max 3.0," Intel has changed its frequency management to support improved turbo frequencies for both the fastest and next-fastest pair of cores. Lightly threaded workloads will target these four fastest cores; a new Windows scheduler patch intelligently rotates workloads across favored cores to work with this scheme directly, improving performance and reliability. The new Windows scheduler arrives with the Windows 10 2H19 update.

 

	Base Freq	All-Core Turbo	Fastest 2 Cores	Next Fastest 2 Cores
Core i9-10980XE	3.0GHz	4.6GHz	4.8GHz	4.7GHz
Core i9-10940X	3.3GHz	4.6GHz	4.8GHz	4.7GHz
Core i9-10920X	3.5GHz	4.6GHz	4.8GHz	4.7GHz
Core i9-10900X	3.7GHz	4.5GHz	4.7GHz	4.6GHz

 

Memory support has doubled, and clock speed has improved since Skylake-X, up from 128GB DDR4-2666 to 256GB DDR4-2933. Intel has also added new onboard Wi-Fi 6 and 2.5G Ethernet support.

 

Deep Learning Boost—a small extension to the x86-64 instruction set, which offers significant benefits for certain AI-driven workloads—is available in Cascade Lake-X. Although applications must be built with compilers that recognize the new DLB instructions, throughput for these workloads, which can include image tagging and enhancement, video analysis, and voice recognition, can easily double with their availability.

Enlarge / The doubled amount of addressable RAM is easily the heavyweight bullet on this slide.

Intel Corporation

Intel Performance Maximizer

IPM, which debuted as an overclocking tool for ninth-generation K-series processors, also supports Cascade Lake-X. IPM is Intel's answer to AMD's similar Precision Boost Overdrive. It also allows enthusiasts to more easily achieve, monitor, and maintain the maximum clock rate their individual CPU (and cooling system) can support.

Enlarge / Intel's Performance Maximizer app, originally aimed at K-series gamers, is coming to the HEDT crowd now with Cascade Lake-X CPU support.

 

 

Source: Intel’s Cascade-X HEDT squares off with AMD’s Threadripper (Ars Technica)