Intel’s desktop-grade Comet Lake-S CPUs to ship with 10 cores on a new socket
Intel’s desktop-grade Comet Lake-S CPUs to ship with 10 cores on a new socket
According to leaked slides from xfastest, Intel’s response will come in the form of their desktop-grade Comet Lake-S series of processors. These CPUs will ship with new 400-series motherboards and a new LGA 1200 socket. Comet Lake-S will allegedly ship with up to 10 cores and with TDPs as high as 125W.Â
Comet Lake’s desktop offerings are due to release in early 2020. In the near term, Intel’s all-core 5GHz i9-9900KS will act as Intel’s response to Ryzen 3rd Gen. Comet Lake will also use Intel’s 14nm manufacturing process, with 10nm being reserved for future desktop products. Comet Lake-S will also continue to use Skylake-style CPU cores, giving Comet Lake similar performance to Coffee Lake at the same clock speeds. Â
With 10 cores and 20 threads, Comet Lake is due to offer a 25% performance boost over Coffee Lake’s highest-end i9-9900K model at the same clock speeds. However, it remains to be seen how well Comet Lake will clock. Extra cores will require more power, and this increased power consumption may result in lower average CPU clock speeds. Even so, users of these processors will likely be able to overclock to around 5GHz with sufficient cooling, just like Intel’s last-generation Coffee Lake K-series processors.Â
Regardless, Intel is responding to 12-core and 16-core AMD processors with 10-cores and a new socket. If this is true, Intel will be seen negatively by a large number of enthusiasts. AMD’s upgrade to Zen 2 required a BIOS update, whereas upgrading to Comel Lake will require both a new CPU and a new motherboard.Â
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At this time it is unknown when Intel plans to move to 10nm in the desktop CPU market.Â
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