Intel’s leaked 10th Gen i3 will be a pre-Zen i7 – The power of competition
Intel’s leaked 10th Gen i3 will be a pre-Zen i7 – The power of competition
Now, Intel’s 10th Generation of desktop CPUs is rumoured to offer 10-core models, boosting Intel’s core counts by 2.5x on its mainstream desktop socket. Stranger still, is that Intel’s pre-Zen i7 specs are also rumoured to become the baseline of Intel’s Core i3 series. That’s right, in three years, Intel i7 has been relegated to i3 status.Â
From 2017 to 2020, it looks like Intel’s i3 series will see a 2x increase in core/thread count, which when combined with clock speeds boosts yields a better than 100% performance gain total accessible performance. Would this have happened without AMD’s competitive Zen offerings, probably not, or at a minimum, not this soon. What was a Kaby Lake i7, will become Comet Lake’s i3, assuming Comet Lake’s long-term rumours hold true.Â
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Leaks regarding Intel’s Comet Lake series date back to early 2019, with older leaks of Intel’s i3-10100 processor confirming the base clock speeds and core/thread counts that are seen in recent processors leaks from Informatica Cero, via Videocardz. Â
Comet Lake is due to be Intel’s next series of 14nm processors, and rumour has it that Intel’s entire core lineup will feature Hyperthreading, with a 10-core i9 processor sitting at the top. This would give i5 six cores and twelve threads, i7 eight cores and sixteen threads and i9 ten cores and twenty threads. Yes, the core architecture will still be Skylake, but with Comet Lake Intel plans to push AMD’s Ryzen lineup in the realms of pure PC performance.
Below are the leaked specifications of Intel’s 10th Generation desktop processors.
| Â | Cores/Threads | Base Clock | Single Core Turbo | All Core Turbo | Turbo Boost 3.0 | Velocity Boost | TDP |
| i9-10900K | 10/20 | 3.7Â GHz | 5.1 GHz | 4.8 GHz | 5.2 GHz | +100MHz | 125W |
| i9-10900 | 10/20 | 2.8Â GHz | 5.0 GHz | 4.5GHz | 5.1 GHz | +100MHz | 65W |
| i7-10700K | 8/16 | 3.8Â GHz | 5.0 GHz | 4.7 GHz | 5.1 GHz | – | 125W |
| i7-10700 | 8/16 | 2.9Â GHz | 4.7 GHz | 4.6 GHz | 4.8 GHz | – | 65W |
| i5-10600K | 6/12 | 4.1Â GHz | 4.8 GHz | 4.5 GHz | – | – | 125W |
| i5-10600 | 6/12 | 3.3Â GHz | 4.8 GHz | 4.4 GHz | – | – | 65W |
| i5-10500 | 6/12 | 3.1Â GHz | 4.5 GHz | 4.2 GHz | – | – | 65W |
| i5- 10400 | 6/12 | 2.9 GHz | 4.3 GHz | 4.0 GHz | – | – | 65W |
| i3-10320 | 4/8 | 3.8Â GHz | 4.6 GHz | 4.4 GHz | – | – | 65W |
| i3-10300 | 4/8 | 3.7Â GHz | 4.4 GHz | 4.2 GHz | – | – | 65W |
| i3-10100 | 4/8 | 3.6 GHz | 4.3 GHz | 4.1 GHz | – | – | 65W |
While Intel has plans to release a 10-core processor, AMD has already delivered a 16-core desktop processor in its AM4 platform, leaving Intel behind in terms of core/thread counts. Even so, Intel plans to compete with higher levels of single-threaded performance, which will come thanks to boosted core clock speeds. Â
You can join the discussion on Intel’s 10th Generation Comet Lake i3 being a pre-Zen i7 on the OC3D Forums.Â