There are hints that Intel will return to the HEDT market with Alder Lake-X

pcgamer.com:

The high end desktop market (HEDT) has been quiet for some time. Intel's last HEDT products were released back in 2019, while AMD's Threadripper 5000 series has so far been restricted to the professional market. Is Intel preparing a new Alder Lake HEDT series? The release notes(opens in new tab) for AIDA64 6.60.5944 (via Tom's Hardware(opens in new tab)) list preliminary support for a CPU series going by the name of Alder Lake-X.

For some time, Intel has referred to its HEDT processors by adding an X suffix. The X moniker has been used by Intel for all of its high end desktop platforms up to the most recent Cascade Lake-X series(opens in new tab), topped by the Core i9 10980XE. It would be an odd mistake by the AIDA64 developers to refer to 13th Gen Raptor Lake as Alder Lake-X, so unless Intel is just messing with us, it would seem as though there is a new HEDT platform coming. And that's very exciting.

Let's speculate as to what form these CPUs could take. We can be sure they will include higher TDPs, overclocking support, perhaps quad channel DDR5 and a whole bunch of PCIe 5.0 lanes, including PCIe 5.0 M.2 support. 

It's possible that Alder Lake-X is a desktop version of Sapphire Rapids(opens in new tab), perhaps with the inclusion of more E cores, or will it omit them in favour of more P cores? Of course, we're just speculating, which is fun to do!

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The HEDT market has fallen by the wayside in recent years, at least on Intel's side. As we see ever