Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S Desktop processors are going to hit retail on the 27th of May next month. According to a report from WCCFTech, the initial announcement will come on the 30th of April with the hard launch happening after roughly a month. This means that we’ll be seeing press releases by the end of this month while the actual products will be available from the 27th of May. The review embargo will also lift in the last week of May.
Intel’s Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs are a direct response to the 3rd Gen Ryzen processors. Knowing that the Skylake core can’t compete with AMD’s latest chips in multi-threaded workloads like content creation and rendering, Team Blue has taken the most obvious approach.
The core clocks have been cranked up all the way to 5.3GHz for the top-end Core i9-10900K, with the Core i7-10700K following shortly behind at 5.1GHz. Other than that, hyperthreading has been enabled across the board and the L3 cache has been expanded to keep the threads from competing for resources.
The Core i5-10600K has a single-core boost of 4.8GHz, a 200MHz increase over the existing 9600K. While this will result in improved performance in games, it won’t be monumental. Considering that the Ryzen 5 3600X is a notch faster than the 9600K in pretty much every task, be it gaming or CC, it’s unlikely that the new chip will be that effective.
Another thing to consider is the pricing of the Ryzen 3000 chips. They’re selling for as much as 50% lower than the competing Coffee Lake parts despite being notably faster. AMD will almost certainly offer additional price cuts to mark the launch of the Comet Lake-S parts and the impending Ryzen 4000 “Renoir” launch.
Lastly, there’s Rocket Lake-S. Many sources claim that we’ll be seeing these processors featuring the Willow Cove core by the end of 2020. If that indeed is true, what’ll happen to the newly launched Comet Lake-S lineup? Will these chips continue to exist side by side or be discontinued?
