No longer the HEDT champ. Intel used to rule the roost as far as high-end desktop CPUs were concerned. The Core i9 series scaled to an impressive 18 cores and 36 threads when the 7980XE came marching into town in September 2017. Though costing a not-so-cool two grand, Intel's finest HEDT had just enough firepower to see off the nascent AMD Ryzen Threadripper threat. It left us with a suitably positive performance impression, so much so that we opined 'make no mistake, the Intel Core i9-7980XE is the fastest consumer processor ever launched. A dose of overclocking makes it untouchable for heavily-threaded applications.'

What was true of 2017 is not true of 2019, however. Intel has subsequently launched the slightly faster Core i9-9980XE and today brings the Core i9-10980XE to bear. Both still use a 14nm process, employ the same 18C36T muscle, and use a combination of minor IPC tweaks and frequency uplifts to extract more performance from an ageing core microarchitecture. AMD, meanwhile, has since debuted 32C64T Ryzen Threadrippers for the HEDT space, with the latest 3970X, built on the Zen 2 blueprint, also launching today, offers supreme performance in heavily-threaded applications.