18 core Cascade Lake-X CPU scores 50% more than the Threadripper 2950X in Geekbench; almost 25% more than the Ryzen 9 3900X too

News about Cascade Lake-X (CSL-X), Intel's refreshed 14 nm++ High-End Desktop (HEDT) series, has been steadily trickling onto the internet over the last few months. We initially reported that the LGA 2066 series would be arriving in June, although that date has since passed and there has been no sign of an official release. More recently, a 10 core CLS-X chip appeared on UserBench, although the existence of an 18 core Skylake-X chip made it unlikely that the former would be Intel's new flagship Cascade Lake-X SKU.

Now, someone has posted a mysterious 18 core CPU on Geekbench with the codename Intel 0000. Geekbench identifies the processor as the GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 85 Stepping 7, the same family of chips as the Skylake-X series. The latter also carries the identifier Stepping 4, meaning that the CPU in the Geekbench is not a Skylake-X. Instead, Stepping 7 represents the CSL-X series, the successor to Skylake-X.

The news comes courtesy of @momomo_US, whose tweet was initially picked up Tom's Hardware among other websites. As Tom's Hardware pointed out, Geekbench reported the Intel 0000 as having uncharacteristically low clock speeds and what looked like an incorrect LGA socket. However, the renowned leaker has since posted a second Geekbench listing confirming the correct core and more realistic clock speeds.

Both listings are from Dell Precision 5820 Tower PCs, with the second reporting the 18 core chip as being an LGA 2066, which is in-line with it being from the CSL-X family. According to the second Geekbench listing, the chip has a 2.99 GHz base clock that it can turbo up to 4.49 GHz, which is comparable to the Core i9-9980XE.

Oddly, the second listing achieved lower single and multi-core scores than the first, despite reporting higher clock speeds. However, we are probably looking at early engineering samples, which do not tell the whole story of how their retail counterparts will perform. Despite these probably being early examples of 18 core CSL-X chips, they average 52,675 in Geekbench multicore, with the higher of the two scoring 54,597 points. By contrast, the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, the most powerful Threadripper we have tested, scored 36,198 points in the same benchmark, over 50% shy of the 18 core CSL-X. The Ryzen 9 3900X, the current king of our Geekbench multicore leader board, scored just 43,978 points.

In short, Intel appears to have pushed the needle in the right direction for its next set of HEDT processors. However, with a Zen 2 Threadripper also recently scoring almost 95,000 points on Geekbench, Intel better have something even bigger planned for Cascade Lake-X if it plans to keep with AMD in multicore performance.