You can say many things about Intel’s upcoming 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs: best gaming processors, highest clocked consumer chips, fastest 14nm parts and so on. But one thing they’re not is power efficient. The flagship, Core i9-10900K is expected to draw as much as 300W under load while the Core i7-10700K will very likely cross the 200W barrier in intensive applications. Considering that the competing AMD Ryzen 7 3700X remains under 100W in most scenarios, that’s not a pretty picture:
As you can see, the Core i9-10900T is running at 4.49GHz here and while the resulting score is decent, the power draw is pegged at 123W. This isn’t too high for a 10 core (20 thread) CPU, but the fact that it has a T series label with a rated base power draw of 35W can lead to misunderstandings. Many consumers don’t know that the rated TDP is measured at the base clock and even if they do, I doubt they’ll expect a power draw 4x higher under load.
Intel’s 10th Gen desktop Comet Lake-S CPUs are expected to launch in Q2 2020. While the majority of the chips are just getting bumped up a tier, the flagship Core i9-10900K is a brand new part with 10 cores/20 threads and a boost clock of 5.3GHz. This will undoubtedly be the next best gaming CPU, and it’s likely that even the Ryzen 4000 parts won’t be able to beat it in that metric. However, multi-threaded workloads like content creation and rendering will continue to remain AMD’s territory.
