Intel Core i9-10980XE Review Hits The Web

It’s been a quiet month for CPU launches, which is not what we expected going into it. At the start of last month, Intel said it would release the Core i9-9900KS this month, along with its new Core X-series chips. November is of course right around the corner, and we’ve yet to see any launches, so if any do happen, they’re going to be pulled off at the last minute.

Despite the fact that neither the 9900KS or new Core X-series have hit the market, some websites have found ways to acquire and benchmark them ahead of the rest of the world. The latest is from Romanian tech site lab501, which has taken a look at Intel’s upcoming 18-core Core i9-10980XE across a range of workloads.

If you’ve been paying attention to the CPU market lately, some of the findings in this article shouldn’t surprise you. Against AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X, the 10980XE performs noticeably better in many cases, especially where workloads like rendering are concerned. In encoding tests, the gains on the 18-core are much less pronounced – thanks in part to Zen 2 helping AMD to catch up to Intel.

The results at lab501 don’t include Threadripper results, so we’re sure we’d be seeing even more shake-up throughout if they were present. Despite Intel’s top dog looking good overall, it’s an advantage over a chip like the 3900X at a higher cost. The Core i9-10980XE is expected to cost around $1,000 USD at retail, while the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X is slated to launch next month at $750. Unfortunately for Intel, AMD seems well-prepared for battle, just not with AVX-512.

It’s worth noting that while Intel has yet to drop any new CPUs in October, we also expected AMD to have launched at least one model by now. As soon as the company said last month that it would be delaying the 3950X launch to November, we had a gut feeling Intel would take advantage of that and stretch out its release dates. While October was quiet, it seems certain that November will be really busy with CPU benchmarking.