The Challenger
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t want to talk too much about AMD processors in an Intel CPU review, but this is a crucial context that’s going to come into play several times. However, AMD’s Threadripper was a game-changer in the HEDT world. Threadripper offered more cores and more performance in several workloads for a lot less money. It also had a platform without the lunacy that is vROC and a similar feature set with even more PCIe lanes on the CPU than Intel had.
This is important because it forced Intel to change its tactics and offer higher core counts than it had previously. AMD offered 12c/24t and 16c/32t from the start. Intel and AMD have been going back and forth since then. AMD’s second-generation Threadripper upped the stakes even more with a new 24c/48t offering. The real star of that show was AMD’s 2990XW. A monster 32c/64t part at the price point occupied by Intel’s Core i9 9980XE which had only 18 cores and 36 threads. This CPU was priced (until recently) at nearly $2,000.
Let’s not forget AMD’s Ryzen 3950X. This is a mainstream desktop part that offers 16c/32t for a mere $750. While a lot for a desktop part, it is cheap for the core count and performance it offers. In fact, the 3900X and 3950X have what it takes to seriously compete in a lot of workloads against Intel’s best HEDT parts. Even AMD’s X570 platform sits in between a mainstream and HEDT platform in terms of lane counts and general specifications. So, on one end you have AMD putting the screws to Intel at the top of its mainstream stack and crushing them on the HEDT front with a new baby Threadripper which already has more cores and threads than anything Intel markets outside the Xeon line.
Context is Key
So, that’s it, right? Game over. Well not quite. Intel has slashed prices on its HEDT products in order to reposition them to be more appealing and thus more competitive. This is something Intel isn’t used to doing, but here we are. Intel has recently cut the price of existing 9980XE’s to just under $1,000. The new Core I9 10980XE we are reviewing here replaces the 9980XE at the top of its Core i9 lineup but also takes the 9980XE’s recently adjusted price point. At the time of this writing, the prices shown on Intel’s website give a range of $979-$1,000.
This potentially places the Core i9 10980XE in an interesting context. I think Intel knows it can’t compete with Threadripper on equal footing anymore. It lacks the cores and clock speeds to do so where multi-threaded workloads are concerned. AMD even has a slight IPC advantage which is staved off in some applications (mostly games) by superior clocks by the 9700K, 9900K, KF and KS. As a result, it can’t command the same prices AMD can for its new HEDT parts.
However, we are still talking about something that sits in-between AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series and AMD’s new Threadrippers. Thus, I think Intel has priced the 10980XE accordingly. X299 motherboards are expensive but can be had for the same prices as the X570’s. The CPU sits comfortably in between the 3950X at $750 and the Threadripper 3960X at $1,399.