Users on China’s Chiphell forums have discovered the potential successor to last year’s Core i9-10980XE. According to a CPU-Z and Cinebench R20 capture, Intel is prepping a 22-core, 44-thread Cascade Lake-X processor with the i9-10990XE designation.
This appears to be a chip with a 4.0 GHz base clock and 5.0 GHz boost clock. Scarily enough, the TDP is rated at a record-breaking 380 W. As Tom’s Hardware points out, that is most certainly not a bragging point, being that AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, a 64C/128T beast, features a TDP of “just” 280 W.
As a Cascade Lake-X SKU, the i9-10990XE should be compatible with the X299 chipset and LGA 2066 socket. It will probably only be available to OEMs, however, as its predecessor could not be purchased at standard retail channels.
For the sake of comparison, last year’s Core i9-10980XE featured 18 cores, 36 threads, and a base and boost clock of 3.0 GHz and 3.8 GHz, respectively. That chip only flaunted a 165 W TDP, which is less than half of the Core i9-10990XE’s insane power demand.