ASUS Cascade Lake-X Core i9 10000X HEDT for Socket 2066 Listed - 18 cores, but 48 PCIe lanes

We like these little whoops moments. At an ASUS specification listing, they make mention of the Prime X299 Edition 30. You do wonder if that means 30 rehashes of the chipset :) Pun aside,  the whoops moment is that they are listing the Core i9 10000 X-Series entry with 48 PCIe lanes.

Of course, everybody knows that Core i9 10000 X-Series is inbound as Intel has been talking about it ever since Computex, but this is the first appearance in a spec page of it. Interesting is that it is noted as a 48 lane PCIe 3.0 CPU, yes 3.0. The current top model Core i9 9980XE has 44 PCIe-lanes for the flagship model. So that's four more lanes from the processor.

Image: Momomo_Us

The 10000 series, with up to 18 cores, is based on Cascade Lake-X, which is a derivative Skylake-X at 14nm process. Thus far Intel has not made clear yet if the new processors are hardened for the recent vulnerabilities. If they are re-using a revamped Skylake-X architecture, that'll probably be the case. Intel will also be bumping up default memory frequency support towards DDR4-2933.

The document also mentions that a second m.2 slot works with a 'Core i9 10000 X-Series' processor, meaning. So Intel added four more lanes just for full speed x4 PCIe Gen3 M2 support. You will have noticed the new naming, Intel now is using five digits for their future model numbers much like the comet lake laptop procs announced earlier this week.