Intel claims Cascade Lake-X will be twice as fast as Skylake-X, and outperform second-gen AMD Theadripper

Intel claims Cascade Lake-X will offer better price per pound than AMD Threadripper

Intel is claiming that its forthcoming Cascade Lake-X microprocessors will offer twice the performance of Skylake-X, while comfortably outpacing AMD's second generation Threadripper workstation CPUs.

In the process, Intel has also suggested that Cascade Lake-X will offer better performance per pound compared to Threadripper - indicating a potential shift in pricing strategy by the chip giant.

Cascade Lake-X ought to be released in the next month, offering between 1.74 and 2.09-times the performance of Skylake-X. And a slide revealed in a blog posting by Intel chief performance strategist Ryan Shrout, indicates that it will be significantly more powerful than AMD's flagship second-generation Threadripper 2990WX.

The new Intel processors will be compatible with refreshed LGA 2066 motherboards, capable of supporting higher clock speeds and offering more PCIe lanes. Intel is also expected to follow AMD in adopting PCIe 4.0 providing more bandwidth on the motherboard.

"Intel has dramatic changes coming next month for the X-series and HEDT (high-end desktop market) line as well. The new family of products code-named Cascade Lake-X will offer up to 2x the performance per dollar of the previous generation," wrote Shrout.

However, he added, "it is too early to talk about the specifics".

AMD's Threadripper 2990WX offers 16 cores and 32 threads supported by a cache totalling 40MB. However, high-end third-generation Threadripper promises to radically up the core/thread count, while also doubling the cache - if third generation Ryzen CPUs are any guide.

Shrout also highlighted Intel's upcoming Core i9-9900KS, which Intel has demonstrated at this week's IFA trade show in Berlin running at 5.0GHz in a turbo mode on all cores. "The Core i9-9900K and Core i9-9900KS are TRUE 5.0 GHz processors," Shrout claimed.

Taking a swipe at AMD, though, Shrout also criticised companies that prefer ‘synthetic benchmarks' over ‘real usage' tests.

"[Synthetic benchmarks] provide value if you want a quick and narrow perspective on performance. We still use them internally and know many of you do as well, but the reality is they are increasingly inaccurate in assessing real-world performance for the user, regardless of the product segment in question," claimed Shrout.

Intel's promise of better performance per pound compared to AMD comes as Intel's long-time rival starts to win customers over to devices designed around its Zen architecture, with both Google and Twitter publicly committing AMD's Epyc CPUs for their server farms following its launch in July.