Intel Core i9-10980XE "Cascade Lake-X" Benchmarked

[btarunr]

One of the first reviews of Intel's new flagship HEDT processor, the Core i9-10980XE, just hit the web. Lab501.ro got their hands on a freshly minted i9-10980XE and put it through their test bench. Based on the "Cascade Lake-X" silicon, the i9-10980XE offers almost identical IPC to "Skylake-X," but succeeds the older generation with AI-accelerating DLBoost instruction-set, an improved multi-core boosting algorithm, higher clock speeds, and most importantly, a doubling in price-performance achieved by cutting the cores-per-Dollar metric by half, across the board.

Armed with 18 cores, the i9-10980XE is ahead of the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X in rendering and simulation tests, although not by much (for a chip that has 50% more cores). This is probably attributed to the competing AMD chip being able to sustain higher all-core boost clock speeds. In tests that not only scale with cores, but are also hungry for memory bandwidth, such as 7-zip and Media, Intel extends its lead thanks to its quad-channel memory interface that's able to feed its cores with datasets faster.




As we move to gaming and gaming-related 3D benchmarks, we see the i9-10980XE only marginally ahead of the 3900X in the 3DMark Physics test. This lends credibility to the report where the unreleased 16-core 3950X was seen beating the i9-10980XE in this particular test. With gaming still being the forte of mainstream-desktop processors with lower core counts and higher clock-speeds, we see the likes of the i9-9900K racing ahead on account of significantly higher speeds while having sufficient muscle to handle games. Find more interesting results in the Lab501 review here.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[amit_talkin]

Meh, just wait until 3950x roast it. I am not even talking about TR3.

 

[birdie]

12 vs 18 cores?

3950X will obliterate the Core i9-10980XE.

 

[GlacierNine]

3 Figure price?

That's not even accurate according to Intel's own information: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...-edition-processor-24-75m-cache-3-00-ghz.html

Nevermind that it's barely faster than a product costing $499...

 

[Rahmat Sofyan]

no hope ... XE series almost nothing worth since first XE out

 

[Crackong]

I saw nothing but 3900x simply roasted the 10980xe ....

 

[stimpy88]

My god, the desperation coming from Intel... They actually seem proud that their 18 core CPU is slightly faster than AMDs 12 core part...

Will they be so proud of this ancient CPU design being handily bested by AMDs 16 core (non Threadripper) part, for a fraction of its cost?

 

[Vayra86]

Í'll take two for the price of one.

No?

Fine, then don't.

 

[btarunr]

3 Figure price?

That's not even accurate according to Intel's own information

I too went by Intel's information, but I see now they meant tray pricing. Fixed title.

 

[a111087]

LOL, intel has seen better days... the only saving grace is gaming and i9-9900k

 

[fancucker]

I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows

So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.

 

[oxezz]

I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows

So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.

this gave me a good chuckle

 

[Noztra]

I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows

So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.

That is the most funny thing I have read all day. Thank you very much.

 

[csatahajos]

"I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows "

LOL, what do you smoke dude

Other than maybe the first one the rest is pure BS or urban legends, and even the first one is only if you specifically need any of these three (but honestly Optane is pretty overhyped so far, PCI-E 4 NvmE SSD-s are not much worse).

 

[Crackong]

I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows

So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.

No No.
Based on your considerations,
You should take the 9900k, not the 10980xe.
The 10980xe is simply useless for you.

 

[ppn]

no 9900 is history, take the comet lake 10 core 5Ghz allcore part and see the 3950 falling.

 

[ZoneDymo]

What is up with the 8700k beating everything in DoW3 and Metro?

 

[GlacierNine]

I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows

So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.

- Thunderbolt 3 is able to be implemented by anyone already if they pay the licensing fee, and as part of USB4 if can be implemented even without that licensing fee. ASRock already has an AMD board with TB3. AMD is actually faster than intel in HEVC when comparing equal numbers of cores, despite the clockspeed disadvantage. AMD has their own alternative to Optane, called StoreMI.
- This simply isn't true. Full system power consumption for the 3900X under load is 55W compared to 9980XE at 101W. The 9980XE also doesn't really have any overclocking headroom.
- Those problems haven't really existed since the 2000 series revised memory management. The current 3000 series IMC actually holds the world record for highest overclock on DDR4.
- Actually, clock-for-clock, AMD now has superior IPC and therefore superior single-threaded performance to Intel's architecture. Clockspeed is the only reason Intel still has a Single-threaded advantage, and for highly-threaded CPUs like this that's irrelevant since AMD's clockspeeds are much more comparable to Intel's here.
- AMD X570 has ITX boards available, from ASRock and from Gigabyte.
- This is Microsoft's problem, not AMD's, and has already been resolved by Microsoft updating the task scheduler.

Do you have any other terrible, untrue points to make?

What is up with the 8700k beating everything in DoW3 and Metro?

Higher sustained boost clocks is my guess. Could be either a chip with good boost behaviour, or even that the limitation of threads causes an anomaly where 6/12 forces a workload into an HT thread that would ordinarily be handled on a 7th physical core, limiting the performance of that thread in theory, but in practice keeping that one physical core operating more quickly and therefore at higher boost.

 

[Vya Domus]

This is probably attributed to the competing AMD chip being able to sustain higher all-core boost clock speeds.

It's not, Zen 2 has twice the floating point throughput, that's why. Zen 1 already had a very effective FP pipeline given the resources in each core.

 

[Octavean]

I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows

So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.

If by TB3 you mean Intel Thunderbolt 3 then you can remove that from your list. There are actually some retail AMD motherboards that have Thunderbolt 3. I find it hard to believe anyone "Needs" it but it is an option if you want it.

Odd but true.

Edit:

So for example, the ASRock Aqua X570 has Thunderbolt 3 built into the io. Its probably one of the most expensive boards but its not the only AMD X570 board that now has Thunderbolt 3.

So again if TB3 means Thunderbolt 3 then take that off the list,.....

 

[The3D_]

I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows

So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.

He is delusional, take him to the infirmary

 

[GlacierNine]

If by TB3 you mean Intel Thunderbolt 3 then you can remove that from your list. There are actually some retail AMD motherboards that have Thunderbolt 3. I find it hard to believe anyone "Needs" it but it is an option if you want it.

Odd but true.

Not to mention that Thunderbolt 3 is available to everyone anyway, as an optional part of the USB 4 specification, meaning it can be used by anyone who wants to implement it alongside their USB 4 implementation.

"Regarding USB4 specification’s optional support for Thunderbolt 3, USB-IF anticipates PC vendors to broadly support Thunderbolt 3 compatibility in their USB4 solutions given Thunderbolt 3 compatibility is now included in the USB4 specification and therefore royalty free for formal adopters," the USB-IF said in a statement. "That said, Intel still maintains the Thunderbolt 3 branding/certification so consumers can look for the appropriate Thunderbolt 3 logo and brand name to ensure the USB4 product in question has the expected Thunderbolt 3 compatibility. Furthermore, the decision was made not to make Thunderbolt 3 compatibility a USB4 specification requirement as certain manufacturers (e.g. smartphone makers) likely won’t need to add the extra capabilities that come with Thunderbolt 3 compatibility when designing their USB4 products."

 

[Kapone33]

What is up with the 8700k beating everything in DoW3 and Metro?

Older games that don't advantage of more than 4 cores.

 

[Caqde]

I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows

So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.

1) The 10980XE does not support any HEVC it doesn't have an IGP and AMD has a few TB3 motherboards. So optane i guess?
2) LOL what? X299 idle is not low by any means. Overclocking I could give you if you want a household heater.
3) Early adoption of AMD 1st gen Ryzen maybe what issues are you talking about now. 3rd Gen Ryzen is has very good motherboards and memory support.
4) Uhm Intel's HEDT uses a different internal memory architecture than desktop Intel chips. This leads to higher latencies and with that a loss is ST performance giving the lead to AMD whoops so much for ST performace. Check the game benchmarks above. And also pay attention to the point that the 10980xe and Ryzen 3900x have similar clock frequencies and AMD won when it came to games every time in the charts picked. Even going to the source site it is hard to find any real win for Intel even when cherry picking your data.
5) See 4.
6) X399 yeah. Although there are quite a few X570 boards if the 3950X is an option in that size category depending on your needs.
7) It's new? And optimizations are coming with every new version of Windows 10. Although this really isn't a thing that should be an issue given that Ryzen is fast enough already.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Older games that don't advantage of more than 4 cores.

Yeah but how does that explain it? the 8700k is a 6 core cpu, 9900k/9700k is a more modern, higher clocked, 8 core cpu.
Both have more cores the games can use but the 9900k/9700k is better right? so why are they doing worse?

EDIT, guess Glacier's speculation will have to do, but its still just odd to me, I would think processor makers could figure stuff like this out.