When the Ryzen and Threadripper series of processors came out, Intel reacted by lowering the prices for its Enthusiast series processors by almost half. And now, with the announcement of the Cascade Lake-X series, history is repeating itself.

Intel has officially unveiled this series of processors, and prices are about half as much as the previous one. For the first time, the company offers all models in the Enthusiast/Extreme series for less than $1000.

The top model, the Core i9 10980XE Extreme Edition, comes with 18 cores for $979, the model it replaces costing nearly $2000. In terms of frequencies, you have a 100-200MHz turbo-boost, which is the same Skylake architecture that we have known for several years. The cheapest model, the Core i9 10900X that came out online a few days ago, will cost $590.

A very interesting model is the Core i9 10920X, which offers 12 cores with hyperhtreading, at the price of $690, a price lower than an R9 3900X, which comes with the advantage of a greater number of possible PCI-Express connections ... although, having Given that Ryzen has PCI-E 4.0, the differences would not be massive.

However, the Intel Cascade Lake-X series is set to battle the Threadripper 3000 series, launching next month, when AMD will announce its new processors. However, with only a maximum of 18 cores, compared to a minimum of 24 offered by Threadripper 3000, it will be a tough fight.

At least you will be able to fight the AMD R9 processors series here, even offering a platform that sounds invincible on paper, with more cores and potentially even lower prices. It remains to be seen how much they will actually cost on the market, and, of course, to see how they fare in tests. Since these processors have a TDP of 165W, are fiercely energy-consuming and do not have the advantage of very high frequencies on all cores such as models for the platform dedicated to the general public.