Intel Cascade Lake-X 18 And 10-Core Zen 2 Competitors Flex In Beefy Leaked Benchmark
What appear to be a pair of unreleased Cascade Lake-X (CSL-X) processors have found their way to Geekbench, the popular benchmarking suite and veritable hot spot for CPU leaks. In this case, the leaked entries point to a variant with 18 cores and 36 threads of computing muscle, and a second slice of silicon with 10 cores and 20 threads.
Cascade Lake-X will eventually take its place as Intel's top-ranking high-end desktop (HEDT) series, supplanting Skylake-X in the ever-growing Core-X family. Cascade Lake is not entirely new, of course—Intel launched a line of Cascade Lake Xeon CPUs back in April, then more recently quietly introduced a bunch of Xeon W 3000 series based on Cascade Lake-W (CSL-W).
The next stop for Cascade Lake is in HEDT territory, and we are getting an early peek at performance, assuming these leaked entries are legitimate. Have a look...
Both chips are installed inside a Dell Precision 5820 workstation tower, according to the Geekbench entries. The database reads the processor IDs as "GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 85 Stepping 7," seemingly indicating these are indeed Cascade Lake-X parts, though Geekbench also lists the processor codename as Skylake-X. That is presumably incorrect, as is the LGA 1151 foundation reported by Geekbench. Barring a big surprise, these will actually slip into Intel's LGA 2066 socket.
It's not uncommon for benchmark databases to mislabel parts of a CPU or platform when dealing with engineering samples. The clockspeeds could also be wrong, either because they are being misread, or due to further tweaking by Intel's part en route to these SKUs actually shipping as finalized products.
All that said, the individual entries show the 18-core/36-thread part running at 2.19GHz (base) to 3.28GHz (boost), while the 10-core/20-thread CPU is shown running at 3.39GHz to 4.59GHz.
As for the scores, the 18-core/36-thread chip scores 5,387 in the single-core test, and 54,597 in the multi-core test. That is roughly in line with AMD's second-generation Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX (see here), which features 24 cores and 48 threads.
The 10-core/20-thread Cascade Lake-X chip scores 5,468 and 39,820 in those same tests.which roughly matches up with a 12-core/24-thread Ryzen Threadripper 2920X (see here).
These are solid scores for Intel's Cascade Lake-X CPUs, at least as things stand currently. Bear in mind that AMD is prepping another round of Ryzen Threadripper processors based on its latest Zen 2 CPU architecture. It will be interesting to see what a 7-nanometer node and Zen 2's refinements can bring to the HEDT space in AMD's camp.
As it relates to that, a supposed 32-core/64-thread Zen 2 Threadripper chip recently found its way to Geekbench as well, where it scored 5,677 in the single-core test and a whopping 94,772 in the multi-core test. Let the next-gen HEDT games begin.
