Those expecting big things in the HEDT department from Intel anytime soon may want to temper expectations. It looks like Intel 11th-Gen Core-X and Core-X CPUs won’t be launching this year.
New slides from a meeting involving an Asian Intel partner held earlier this week suggest Intel has no plans to launch any Core-X chips this year. Alongside, the slides also suggest Intel’s will pull the brakes at 18-cores for its highest-end CPU for this year, possibly a Cascade Lake SKU.
The slides were obtained by a user on the official Republic of Gamers forum. The slides highlight Intel’s release roadmap for the high-end market for the rest of 2020, and it is glaringly bare on all fronts. The signs suggest we shouldn’t expect much in terms of seismic releases from Intel until 2021.
Although this comes as less of a surprise given the recent launch of the Comet Lake-S series, Intel reportedly has no plans to update the Core-S line despite rumors that the Rocket Lake-S series could launch by the end of 2020 as either a 10th-Gen rejig or as a next-gen option.
It seems that Intel may be banking on the 14nm Comet Lake-S series to lead the charge for the foreseeable future with an eye on releasing 11th-gen products to counteract the launch of AMD’s Zen 3 chips. Limited stock suggests Comet Lake-S is doing well, but this could also be down to Intel shipping out less volume than planned due to the distribution woes thrown up by the coronavirus pandemic.
Although the content of the slides remains unconfirmed, there’s little to question their authenticity at this point. It seems clear that Intel is virtually finished with pushing out any new consumer HEDT CPUs for 2020. On other fronts, Intel is still on course to release its Tiger Lake mobile CPUs and reportedly the discrete Xe graphics card this year.