You've probably read our Core i9 10980XE review right? The most versatile (in cores) HEDT processor for the consumer market from Intel, a $979 product that sits as the flagship processor in the new Cascade lake line of processors with 18-cores. Well, Intel might be brewing something more.

Over in Asia the Chiphell forums shows two screenshots that will stir up some hype, a 22-core part on the X299 platform has been spotted. It's called, tagged and labeled the Core i9-10990XE, and perhaps Intel is looking to release it? it has four more cores compared to the current flagship product.

The Core i9-10990XE is shown in a CPU-Z screenshot as well as a Cinebench result. Zooming in on the specs you can see a "Cascade Lake-X" architecture. The proc is listed as having 22 cores 44 threads. Cache info shows 1 MB of dedicated L2 cache per core and 30.25 MB of shared L3 cache. Interesting is that this engineering sample is listing a base clock of 4.00 GHz with 5 GHz shown in the screenshot (we assume one core turbo). The i9-10990XE is listing 14,005 points in CB20 which is Threadripper 3960X territory (24 cores). I should mention the TDP listed though, 380 Watt. Have a peek:





