Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop processors are going to be based on the tried and tested methodology of “increase the core clocks as much as you can, and hope for the best”. The flagship, Core i9-10900K is the only chip that will feature a higher core count over the preceding Coffee Lake parts. However, considering the costs and thermal requirements, it’s mainly going to target gamers and enthusiasts with deep pockets.
We recently reported that the Core i9-10900K on account of its 5.3GHz single-core boost and 4.8GHz all-core boost will perform very close to the Ryzen 9 3900X. While that is true, it’ll almost certainly draw twice as much power compared to its Zen 2 rival while offering similar levels of performance. (rockstarjackets) That isn’t a very encouraging statement.
Today, the Geekbench score of the Core i9-10900F has surfaced and it’s rather disappointing:
Despite packing two more cores, it delivers notably less performance than the existing 9900K (~170W), all the while drawing ~50W more (total: 220W).
The Core i9-10900F is the non-K variant of the 10th Gen flagship lacking integrated graphics. It’s going to be priced a notch below the 10900 and offer 90% of the 10900K’s performance. The fact that it fails to match up to even the 9900K means that the 10900K will need enormous levels of power to deliver the marketed performance (~300W+).
Considering these factors, it looks like only the K variants of the 10th Gen Comet Lake-S lineup will be viable. Intel is set to announce the new CPUs on the 31st of April, with a launch followed in May.
