Intel has popped a cap into its aged HEDT or Excessive Finish Desktop CPUs and motherboard chipsets. Yup, Cascade Lake-X and the X299 chipset that help it are goners based on new Product Discontinuation Notices (PCNs) from Intel.
Cascade Lake-X, in fact, dates again to 2019. As its tenth Gen nomenclature implies, the Intel Core i9 10980XE Excessive Version CPU (and its three different Cascade Lake-X siblings) was primarily based on fairly historic tech being a lightweight revision of ye olde Skylake.
Nonetheless, what Cascade Lake-X did have going for it, other than absolutely 18 cores operating at as much as 4.8GHz, was luggage of bandwidth from a quad-channel reminiscence controller and 48 PCIe lanes, albeit the latter are solely Gen 3.0 spec, which suggests you solely want 12 PCIe Gen 5 lanes to match that facet of Cascade Lake-X’s throughput.
Inevitably, with the demise of Cascade Lake-X CPUs comes the top of help chipset manufacturing. The X299 chipset and its LGA2066 socket are toast, too. X299 is even older than Cascade Lake-X, in fact, having launched approach again within the mists of 2017 and supported Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs, too.
Taken within the spherical, it means Intel now not operates within the HEDT market, although the affect of the product discontinuation is not prompt. In contrast to Intel’s cancellation of its Arc A770 LE graphics playing cards, which had rapid impact, Intel says shipments of Cascade Lake-X CPUs and X299 chipsets will really proceed till January 2025.
Intel signifies it can proceed to just accept orders till April subsequent yr. For us, these chips aren’t any nice loss. For gaming, Intel’s newer Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs are merely quicker. Frankly, even for duties like video encoding, a prime finish Raptor Lake chip just like the Core i9 13900K shall be faster than any Cascade Lake-X CPU.
As a substitute, Cascade Lake-X and the X299 chipset is simply of constant curiosity for very particular workflows the place the quad-channel reminiscence controller or potential to fit in oodles of PCIe peripherals is completely important.
For such purposes, in future clients must shift over to even pricier Xeon workstation platforms. As issues stand, Intel has not introduced a brand new HEDT line primarily based on its newest Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs. So mainstream Raptor Lake and sure a Raptor Lake refresh later this yr shall be pretty much as good because it will get for the foreseeable.
