We’ve been covering the upcoming 10th Gen Intel Comet-S and H lineups for a while now. While the desktop offerings might just turn out to be decent stack, the high-performance mobile chips (H) are a bit concerning. Intel is basically re-releasing the same CPUs with increased operating clocks. There might be exceptions, however. A hex-core i5-10500H is a possibility, but other than that the rest of the lineup is mostly unchanged. The problem with selling the same old lineup as a rebrand in the mobility segment is that it might backfire in the high-end segment.
The Core i7-9750H already heats up and throttles to the point of being slower than the 9300H in many laptops. Now imagine the same chip running ay even higher frequencies. I seriously doubt any changes to the IHS can mitigate the thermal throttling. Today, the Geekbench score of the Core i9-10880H has surfaced, and it’s the same story once more. The new CPU is roughly 100MHz faster than its predecessor. That’s the only apparent difference. Accordingly, the performance is a meager 10-15% better:
The older Core i9-9880H runs at a base clock of 2.30GHz and a boost of 4.79GHz. The 10880H has the same base frequency, but the boost has been increased to 4.88GHz. Both chips have the same core/thread count of 8/16 with 16MB of L3 cache and 256KB of L2 per core.
The additional 200MHz isn’t entirely responsible for the double-digit gain. We probably have hardware-level mitigations and other microcode updates to thank as well. Intel’s Comet Lake-H lineup is expected to launch in March to combat AMD’s Ryzen 4000 Renoir lineup. The latter features as many as eight cores and sixteen threads and thanks to the 7nm node, boasts a TDP of just 35W in case of the flagship, the Ryzen 7 4800HS.
