Intel latest Comet Lake-H Mobile CPUs target AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series lineup
Intel latest Comet Lake-H Mobile CPUs target AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series lineup
With these products, AMD and Intel are primarily competing for the 45W TDP segment, with Intel continuing to rely on 14nm Skylake-based designs while AMD has pushed forward with Zen 2 CPU cores and 7nm lithography. At team Intel, the company’s marketing are pitting their latest processors against high-end PCs from three years ago, whereas AMD is marketing their notebooks against Intel’s current offerings.Â
Gaming is a focus for Intel’s marketing this time, alongside high peak clock speed claims. For its comparisons, Intel is comparing its latest processors to a 3-year-old Intel notebook, hoping to target those who frequent upgrade to new mobile systems. The chart below highlights this marketing angle, though it is worth noting that these performance changes rely on both CPU and GPU hardware changes.Â
The slide below compares a PC with an i9-10980HK and an RTX 2080 Super with a system with an i7-7820HK with a GTX 1080. That’s not a fair comparison, as it overstates Intel’s CPU performance gains by a huge margin. If anything, Intel’s taking credit for some of Nvidia’s work here, though some of these games are known to be CPU-limited. This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison here.Â
Intel, if you want to highlight the changes in your CPU alone, use systems with Thunderbolt 3 and an external graphics card. This slide has opened you up to a lot of criticism.Â
The major draw of these new processors is Intel’s promise of higher clock speeds than the company’s older 9th generation hardware. On the high-end, up to 5.3GHz processors are promised, but this comes with a few caveats.Â
The higher boost frequencies of these parts use a feature called Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB), a feature which must be supported by OEMs. Thermal Velocity Boost requires additional thermal headroom, which means that manufacturers will need to overbuild their systems to support this feature. This will net end users boost clock speeds which are 200MHz higher, at the cost of increased power draw and lower battery life. Even so, clock speeds of up to 5.3GHz on a laptop are incredibly impressive. Â
It looks like the real-world performance of these processors will vary widely depending on the power and cooling setups that OEM pair up with these 10th generation Intel processors. Intel is giving OEMs a lot of versatility here, which will allow them to develop some incredibly powerful systems. That said, performance increases come with a power and cooling cost, which will make high-performance Comet Lake-H series bulky and power-hungry. Â
Intel has claimed that they have over 30 designs planned for the “thin and lite” product category and over 100 models across consumer, commercial and workstation segments.Â
| Â | Cores Threads |
Base Freq |
Turbo Freq |
Turbo Freq (With TVB) |
DDR4 | TDP | Configurable TDP |
| i9-10980HK (Unlocked) |
8 / 16 | 2.4 | 5.1 | 5.3 | 2933 | 45 W | 65 W |
| i7-10875H | 8 / 16 | 2.3 | 4.9 | 5.1 | 2933 | 45 W | – |
| i7-10850H (Partially Unlocked) |
6 / 12 | 2.7 | 4.9 | 5.1 | 2933 | 45 W | – |
| i7-10750H | 6 / 12 | 2.6 | 4.8 | 5.0 | 2933 | 45 W | – |
| i5-10400H | 4 / 8 | 2.6 | 4.6 | – | 2933 | 45 W | – |
| i5-10300H | 4 / 8 | 2.5 | 4.5 | – | 2933 | 45 W | – |
With this new generation of mobile processors, Intel wants to enable increased support for Thunderbolt 3 (though it isn’t mandatory) and Integrated WiFi 6 support. RAM speeds have also been increased from 2666MHz to 2933MHz.Â
You can join the discussion on Intel’s 10th Generation Comet Lake-H processors on the OC3D Forums. Â