As AMD has already announced the Ryzen
Threadripper 3990X, a 64core beast that has
a lot of power inside and will definitely change
the CPU market, Intel has a counterattack.

A Core I9-10990XE has been spotted offering 22 cores at a base clock of 4 GHz and a single-core boost of over 5 GHz which gives it some more power to compete with AMD.

However there’s one catch: The power draw from the CPU socket (TDP) will be a whopping 380 watts which will require a very reliable power supply to the CPU socket and a very reliable VRM section close to the CPU socket.

The screenshot above shows the new beast that shall help Intel to compete with AMD’s latest CPU monster that will hit the shelves on February 7th.

The same tech site also has made a Cinebench benchmark to se how the processor will hold against Xeon processors:

The result is remarkable if compared to a 5890 US$ (MSRP) 8168 Xeon processor with 48 cores/96 threads

However the downside of this is the massive TDP of 380W and (if someone really dares to overclock it) the overclock power draw of 500 watts. Man! That thing is as hungry as a high-end graphics card on adrenaline (by which we peek to the recently released Titan RTX!).

The fact that it is aimed to be used on a X299 chipset platform will make it necessary for mainboard designers to build mainboards that are able to cope with that beast. 2066 pins have to deliver 380-500 watts of power while Threadripper has “only” 280 watts to spread over more than 4000 pins.

So once again AMD sets the speed but at the sacrifice of extreme heat dissipation. Let’s remember: Intel has made a Pentium III with 1100MHz which ran very unstable, later there was the Pentium 4 Willamette with 3.4GHz that also had thermal issues.

So is the story repeating once again? At least you should have a very good liquid cooling solution for the CPU because that beast can get quite hot. AMD has the advantage that their processor has way more heatspreader area to dissipate the 280W to while the i9-10990XE has a quadratic form with only about half the size of the Threadripper heatspreader area. So not only the water circulation must be good, also the copper cooler should be of very good quality as well as the heat transfer compound between the heatspreader and the copper cooler.

Otherwise we might see another overheated Intel processor that is more throttling than “calculating” due to a bad-balanced thermal management.

Oh, there’s no release date known yet as well as no price has been reported for this hot thing! Just a coincidence as Intel speculates that people wouldn’t buy that most-likely overpriced CPU at all?