According to a report from Spanish outlet El Chapuzas, Intel is going to announce its 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs on the 30th of April next month. This will just be the product reveal with the actual product launch coming later in May along with reviews. Like Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake, Comet Lake is another 14nm Skylake rehash. (augustafreepress.com) Although we’re getting hyperthreading across the board and an increased core count for the Core i9-10900K flagship, the base IPC and architecture are the same.
We’ve heard a lot about Comet Lake, and pretty much the entire lineup has been leaked. Like existing 14nm lineups, there will be the K and non-K parts, then the F variants lacking the iGPUs and lastly the low-power T parts. Comet Lake will be Intel’s first consumer CPUs to feature boost clocks in excess of 5GHz out of the box. On the downside, that also means thermals and power draw will be worse off too.
CPU Name | Cores/Threads | Base Clock | Boost Clock | All Core Boost Clock | Cache | TDP |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Intel Core i7-10700K | 8/16 | 3.8GHz | 5.0GHz | 4.7GHz | 16 MB | 125W |
Intel Core i7-10700 | 8/16 | 2.9GHz | 4.7GHz | 4.8GHz | 16 MB | 65W |
Intel Core i5-10600K | 6/12 | 4.1GHz | 4.8GHz | 4.5GHz | 12 MB | 125W |
Intel Core i5-10600 | 6/12 | 3.3GHz | 4.8GHz | 4.4GHz | 12 MB | 65W |
Intel Core i5-10500 | 6/12 | 3.1GHz | 4.5GHz | 4.2GHz | 12 MB | 65W |
Intel Core i5-10400 | 6/12 | 2.9GHz | 4.3GHz | 4.0GHz | 12 MB | 65W |
Intel Core i3-10350K | 4/8 | TBD | TBD | TBD | 8 MB | 125W |
Intel Core i3-10320 | 4/8 | 3.8GHz | 4.6GHz | 4.4GHz | 8 MB | 65W |
Intel Core i3-10300 | 4/8 | 3.7GHz | 4.4GHz | 4.2GHz | 8 MB | 65W |
Intel Core i3-10100 | 4/8 | 3.6GHz | 4.3GHz | 4.1GHz | 8 MB | 65W |
Intel Core i9-10900K | 10/20 | 3.7GHz | 5.3GHz | 4.9GHz | 20 MB | 125W |
Intel Core i9-10900 | 10/20 | 2.8GHz | 5.2GHz | 4.6GHz | 20 MB | 65W |
We’ve seen leaks where the Core i7-10700K drew as much as 250W and the 10900K crossing the 300W barrier! That means you’ll almost certainly need liquid coolers to run these chips at their full potential.
Another fact we need to keep in mind is that the Rocket Lake lineup is expected to launch later this year. That’s the first time I’ve seen Intel plan two consecutive generations within a year. From what I can tell, it appears to be a knee-jerk reaction to the Ryzen 4000 “Vermeer” launch.
Higher IPC and clocks mean that the dated Skylake core won’t be able to keep up with the Zen 3 parts. So, a backport of the much more advanced Willow Cove design makes a lot of sense. What I’m not sure about is how much of an advantage (or disadvantage) will the 14nm process prove to be. We won’t be getting the answers to these questions anytime soon, so there’s plenty of time to ruminate.