Intel kills off ancient high-end desktop Cascade Lake-X CPUs and X299 chipset

pcgamer.com:

Intel has popped a cap into its elderly HEDT or High End Desktop CPUs and motherboard chipsets. Yup, Cascade Lake-X and the X299 chipset that support it are goners according to new Product Discontinuation Notices (PCNs) from Intel.

Cascade Lake-X, of course, dates back to 2019. As its 10th Gen nomenclature implies, the Intel Core i9 10980XE Extreme Edition CPU (and its three other Cascade Lake-X siblings) was based on pretty ancient tech being a light revision of ye olde Skylake.

Still, what Cascade Lake-X did have going for it, apart from fully 18 cores running at up to 4.8GHz, was bags of bandwidth from a quad-channel memory controller and 48 PCIe lanes, albeit the latter are only Gen 3.0 spec, which means you only need 12 PCIe Gen 5 lanes to match that aspect of Cascade Lake-X's throughput.

Inevitably, with the demise of Cascade Lake-X CPUs comes the end of support chipset production. The X299 chipset and its LGA2066 socket are toast, too. X299 is even older than Cascade Lake-X, of course, having launched way back in the mists of 2017 and supported Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs, too.

Taken in the round, it means Intel no longer operates in the HEDT market, though the impact of the product discontinuation isn't instant. Unlike Intel's cancellation of its Arc A770 LE graphics cards, which had immediate effect, Intel says shipments of Cascade Lake-X CPUs and X299 chipsets will actually continue until January 2025. 

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Intel indicates it will continue to accept orders until April next year. For us, these chips are no great