Something to look forward to: We know that Intel is preparing to launch its Cascade Lake-X processors next month, which explains why the 10th-gen chips are now showing up in Geekbench. First came the Core i9-10900X, then the Core i9-10980XE appeared.

Intel's next line of HEDT CPUs is a Skylake-X refresh that's still on the 14nm++ process node, and, as shown by the Geekbench entries that used an X299 motherboard, remain compatible with its LGA 2066-based mobos.

First up is the entry-level Core i9-10900X, which boasts 10 cores and 20 threads. According to Geekbench, it has a 3.47GHz base clock and 4.4GHz boost, but momomo_us, who discovered the benchmarks, says it will have a base of 3.7GHz at launch.

The Core i9-10900X has a single-core score of 5204 and a multi-core score of 39717. That puts it ahead of the 18-core/36-thread Core i9-7980XE and AMD's Threadripper 2950X

Soon after that entry was spotted, the line's flagship CPU appeared: the Core i9-10980XE. The 18-core/36-thread chip's entry shows a base clock of 2.46GHz and a boost clock of 3.93GHz, though some sites believe that the base will be higher, and the boost clock will reach 4.7GHz.

Geekbench has the Core i9-10980XE single-core score down as 5381, while its multi-core score is 51514. That puts it way above the competition, especially when it comes to multi-core scores. You can see a comparison with other CPUs in the table below, courtesy of HotHardware.

The rest of the Cascade Lake-X family is made up of the Core i9-10920X (12-core/24-thread) and Core i9-10940X (14-core, 28-thread). Intel says its new chips offer between 1.74 to 2.09 times more performance per dollar than Skylake-X, but they will face a stiff challenge from the Zen 2-based third-generation Threadripper 3000 processors, which use the 7nm process node. If previous benchmarks are anywhere near accurate (5932 single-core/93344 multi-core), AMD's CPUs might blow Cascade Lake-X away.