Intel’s manufacturing is broken and new Rocket Lake CPUs prove it

Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake CPUs prove it is in a crisis of existential proportions. The next six months will decide both its fate and the future direction of the PC as a whole. Hyperbolic? Much? Actually, no.

It’s a somewhat speculative interpretation, to be sure. But tales of Intel’s woes have become so routine of late that the very existence of Rocket Lake and what it implies has been largely overlooked. Rocket Lake says very, very bad things about the viability of Intel’s entire business model. And that, in turn, makes it very significant for the PC as a whole.

Rocket Lake, of course, is Intel’s next desktop CPU architecture. It’s essentially a 14nm backport of Intel’s 10nm Sunny Cove CPU core architecture, as seen in 10th Gen Ice Lake notebook chips. Rocket Lake won’t be released until next year, which means Intel will be launching a new CPU design in 2021 on the ancient 14nm node. Intel’s original plan was to move to 10nm in 2016. Yes, really.

Intel has sold the whole ‘backporting’ thing as a positive, a sort of groovy and inclusive approach to CPU manufacturing. “Hey guys, relax. We’re flexible, we can port from node to node. It’s freestyle. It’s all good,” Intel seems to be saying.

The reality is that there’s really no such thing as a node-agnostic CPU architecture. It’s going to cost a huge amount of money to port those Sunny Cove cores, PCI Express 4.0 I/O and Xe-based graphics to 14nm for Rocket Lake.

So, it’s not groovy or flexible. It’s a move made out of desperation because Intel’s 10nm production node still isn’t good enough for the prime time. Let’s repeat that. Rocket Lake will be launched in 2021 in 14nm because Intel’s 10nm still won’t be good enough for a desktop CPU launch.

That’s going to come at a cost. For Rocket Lake, Intel is regressing from 10 cores, as seen in the current Core i9-10900K, back to eight cores. Because those Sunny Cove cores were never intended for 14nm. And they’re big and fat and power hungry when ported to 14nm.

There are further factors that make Rocket Lake look plain odd. In September, Intel officially confirmed an eight-core ‘H’ version of its latest 10nm Tiger Lake laptop chips exists. It’s a CPU that would make Rocket Lake totally redundant. So why doesn’t Intel launch that chip on the desktop instead of Rocket Lake? The only plausible reason is that 10nm remains fundamentally broken.

As a short term stop gap, Rocket Lake probably just about makes sense, even if Intel’s marketing pitch for the step back to eight cores is almost certainly going to make your ears bleed. But further out, this ‘backporting’ shizzle surely isn’t a goer. 

Currently, Intel says its first 10nm desktop CPU will be Alder Lake, due in the second half of next year. That’s the one with the new big.LITTLE hybrid architecture and up to eight performance cores and eight efficiency cores. If backporting Ice Lake to 14nm came with compromises, backporting Alder Lake to 14nm would surely be even less appealing.

In short, Alder Lake probably has to be on 10nm to be viable. But there are no signs at all that Intel’s 10nm is going to be good enough in a little over six months. It’s worth remembering that, to date, Intel is still only selling quad-core mobile CPUs on 10nm. The launch of the 10nm Ice Lake-SP server chip, once due in 2019, has been delayed once again into early 2021. And you’d be brave to assume it’ll hit that deadline.

What’s more, earlier this summer Intel conceded that its 7nm node, once touted as the solution to all its 10nm woes, was behind schedule by what it characterised as a full year. 7nm won’t be on stream until at least late 2022. Being realistic, then, 2023 is the earliest you’ll see Intel 7nm processors. And if you had to bet, you probably wouldn’t fancy 2023 much.

Meanwhile, the Taiwanese chip foundry that powers many of Intel’s competitors, TSMC, seems to be going from strength to strength. Admittedly, direct comparisons of production nodes are tricky. Most observers agree that Intel’s 10nm node is equivalent to TSMC’s 7nm for transistor density. But you can, today, buy actual shipping consumer products powered by fairly large, complex chips built on not only TSMC 7nm but TSMC 5nm.

Fair to say, then, that TSMC 5nm looks healthier than Intel 10nm right now. Which puts TSMC not just one but two full nodes ahead. That is an awful indictment of Intel’s predicament.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that Intel is rapidly approaching a crunch point of existential proportions. It can probably just about get away with Rocket Lake. But if it can’t bend 10nm into some kind of shape in time for Alder Lake in the second half of 2021 then it’s entire future roadmap becomes non-viable and Intel will surely have to seriously consider the previously unthinkable. Namely, giving up on making its own chips and farming them out to a third party foundry. At which point it’s no longer Intel as we knew it.

Indeed, there’s a good chance Intel has either already made that call or is right in the thick of thrashing it out. It’s just possible Intel has already decided to make that fundamental strategic shift, to not invest the billions required to make 7nm happen, but to spend that money turning itself into an IP-based business like AMD rather than what it is today—a manufacturing business that needs in-house chip designs to keep those billion-dollar fabs fed.

Of course, speculation about future events is often a mug’s game. It can take years for events to unfold. But this time it’s different. Intel is approaching that existential crunch point and fast. Six months from now, we’ll know if Intel has turned things around. Or if the fundamental technological landscape that underpins the PC we love is about to go through a dramatic change.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X ends Intel’s hegemony in single-thread perf; 10% faster than Core i9-10900K and 23% faster than Ryzen 9 3900X

Intel has traditionally held the single-core performance crown for many generations. AMD did get close to Intel 9th gen Coffee Lake, but Comet Lake once again showed good leads in single-core and gaming. With Ryzen 5000 Zen 3, Intel may not be in a comfortable position any longer.

User /u/losh11 (@loshan1212) first posted CPU-Z results of the Ryzen 5 5600X on Reddit. The OP had since deleted the post, but the results were shared quickly to other subreddits. CPU-Z screenshots and product packaging of the Ryzen 5 5600X were subsequently reposted by @GawroskiT on Twitter.

In the CPU-Z single-thread benchmark, the Ryzen 5 5600X scored 643 points leading the Core i9-10900K by 10% and the Core i7-10700K by 15%. The Zen 3 processor also seems to be 23.4% faster than a Ryzen 9 3900X in single-core, which shows that AMD is leaving no stone unturned in the quest to extract the maximum possible peak performance from the new architecture.

The Ryzen 5 5600X seems to be no slouch in the multi-core either with the processor amassing 4,814 points — 12% faster than the Core i5-10600KF and 14% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600XT.

This is not the first demonstration of AMD’s new found single-core leads, though. Previously, we saw the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and the Ryzen 5 5600X posting impressive single-core results beating Intel’s flagship Core i9-10900K by a significant margin.

While it is always advisable to wait for final reviews before coming to conclusions, these initial scores do indicate that AMD may have a definite winner on their hands with Zen 3 that does not compromise either in single-core or multi-core workloads.

Intel quietly upgrades the Core i3-9100F processor to 10th-gen for the same price

u/Akira13645 on Reddit has observed that Intel has updated the Core i3-x100F series for the final quarter of 2020 (4Q2020). This recently-established line exists to offer budget processing without UHD graphics. The new i3-10100F still fits this mold, although it also has marked Comet Lake-afforded advantages over its predecessor.

For example, it is the first F-variant to exhibit Intel Hyper-Threading Technology – which means double the threads for its 4 cores for the first time. They can use Turbo Boost Max v2.0 for a maximal clock of 4.3GHz, whereas the i3-9100F could only go up to 4.2GHz.

The i3-10100F also now supports up to 128GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, whereas its predecessor was rated for half that much DDR4-2400 memory. There is also a maximum bandwidth of 41.6 GB/s compared to 37.5 GB/s. The Comet Lake-based i3 F variant also uses the LGA 1200 socket rather than the LGA 1151.

Then again, the two chipsets share a TDP of 65W, a 6MB cache, have 2-channel memory and are, of course, still both 14nm. The Core i3-10100F is also still pitched at low-powered PCs, probably thin clients and tablets, and has an MRSP of US$79 to $97.

Intel Announces 10nm SuperFin Atom x6000E Elkhart Lake, Celeron and Pentium CPUs

Intel announced its new Atom x6000E series ‘Elkhart Lake’ of processors today, along with Pentium and Celeron N and J series chips, all targeted at industrial, embedded, and IoT applications. Intel is also pressing its Tiger Lake-UP3 chips into service for edge applications that require a higher level of performance. 

The Atom x6000E, Pentium, and Celeron processors feature either dual- or quad-core Tremont designs. Base frequencies for the Atom models vary between 1.2 to 1.8 GHz, while boost speeds top at at 3.0 GHz for chips that come with the feature. The Atom chips serve the 4.5W to 12W TDP range, while Intel splits the Pentium and Celeron processors into 6.5W and 10W variants. 

All models have baked in support for up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR4-3200 or LPDDR4x-4267 memory, much like the Tiger Lake processors, and come in BGA-mounted packages, meaning they aren’t socketed processors. Intel also segments the stack by only providing ECC support for the Atom processors. 

The lineup comes with Gen11 graphics, which Intel says offers up to twice the performance of the Gen9 graphics found on prior-gen models. Atom also takes a step forward, courtesy of the Tremont architecture, to notch a 1.7X gain in single-threaded workloads and 1.5X gain in multi-threaded work over previous-gen Goldmont Plus. 

As we see with chips destined for the IoT space, Intel offers a seven to ten-year support window, and that includes ensuring the chips will be available throughout that same window. Intel also leans in on AI support with this generation, including support for the OpenVINO toolkit that includes containerized packages to speed deployment of automation, sensing, and vision applications. 

Tiger Lake-UP3

Intel is also pressing its Tiger Lake-UP3 chips into service for applications that require a higher level of performance. These chips come with all of the normal trimmings of the Tiger Lake processors, which you can read about in-depth here, like the 10nm SuperFin process, Xe LP graphics, Thunderbolt 4, and support for AVX-512 and VNNI. 

Intel Claims Its Cheaper To Build A Faster Gaming PC With Its 10th Gen Core CPUs Than AMD’s Ryzen 3000 CPUs, Pits The Core i7-10700K Against Ryzen 9 3900XT

Intel has released a new set of ‘real-world’ performance benchmarks that compare its 10th Gen Desktop CPUs to the AMD Ryzen 3000XT lineup. The company specifically compares the gaming performance of its chip against its competitors and claims that they offer the best performance package at a cheaper price.

Intel Claims Their Core i7-10700K Is Not Only Faster in Gaming But Also Better Value Than AMD’s Ryzen 3000XT CPUs

The new ‘real world’ performance slides were showcased during a presentation to the APAC regional market. While Intel’s own CEO has stated that the industry should move on from the generic benchmarks showcase, the recent decline in desktop processor shipments has led the company to win over the minds of consumers in the mainstream and high-performance CPU segments with a new set of comparisons. We won’t start with how much controversy the real performance benchmark slides have been marked with since their first outing but recently, the blue team has started using similar priced and similar spec’d configurations that do lead to better representation of real-world usage.

Intel Core i7-10700K 8 Core vs AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT 12 Core CPUs Compared

The comparison consists of the Intel Core i7-10700K and the AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT. The Intel Core i7-10700K is an 8 core and 16 thread CPUs with a base clock of 3.80 GHz, boost clock of up to 5.10 GHz, 20 MB of cache, and a TDP of 125W (229W PL2). The AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT is a 12 core and 24 thread CPU with a base clock of 3.80 GHz, boost clock of up to 4.70 GHz, 70 MB of cache, and a TDP of 105W.

Intel says that their Core i7-10700K CPU is cheaper with a starting price of $387 US ($409.99 US at Newegg) while the AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT CPU is expensive at $499 US ($479.99 US at Amazon). The standard Ryzen 9 3900X which is not featured in these performance metrics costs $429.99 US that is a far better deal than the Ryzen 9 3900XT which offers up to 5% better performance but for a 10 percent price difference.

Intel used similar test setups which featured an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card and 16 GB of DDR4 memory. The memory on the Intel platform was running at 2933 MHz speeds while the AMD platform was running 3200 MHz DIMMs. Now there’s no mention of which motherboard both setups were using but considering that X570 and Z490 boards end up costing around the same, the price difference would be close with Intel offering a slightly better value versus the Ryzen 9 3900XT.

The performance benchmarks show that the Intel Core i7-10700K outperformed the AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT in several AAA titles. The Intel CPU was up to

23% faster in Total War: Warhammer 2

17% faster in Leauge of Legends

15% faster in Monster Hunter World: Iceborne

14% faster in Rocket Leauge

12% faster in War Thunder Tank Battle

6% faster in Total War Three Kingdoms

In addition to the games where the Core i7 scored a double-digit win against the Ryzen 9 CPU, Intel also showcased several other titles where their CPU was more than 3% faster than the 3900XT. The lead was seen in 24 out of the 30 titles tested. In the remaining tests, the Ryzen 9 3900XT secured a lead and surprisingly, the AMD CPU scored better than the Intel part in CSGO which is one of the top played eSports titles. All performance tests were performed on a 1080p resolution. The slides were shared by Benchlife however the exact appendix for workload and configurations isn’t shown.

Sure Intel has a solid lead in gaming performance which was the whole purpose of this comparison but a 12 core and 24 thread CPU also has several other benefits than just gaming. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT can deliver better performance to game streamers and for general productivity tasks and professional uses which many gamers these days also run simultaneously on their desktop PCs.

Its an added benefit from the several cores that Ryzen CPUs provide and while Intel leads the gaming benchmarks, the gap isn’t huge, especially if we compare the standard Ryzen 9 3900X CPU which costs pretty much identical to the Core i7-10700K in the retail segment. If you’re purely building a gamer-focused machine, then Intel CPUs do retain the advantage but the real question is how long will this advantage reside with Intel with Zen 3 fast approaching the desktop PC market.

Intel Unveils 3rd Gen Ice Lake-SP Xeon CPU Family: 10nm+ Sunny Cove Cores, New Instructions, 28 Core Chip Showcased

Intel has unveiled the details of its next-generation Xeon CPU family codenamed Ice Lake-SP at HotChips 32. Coming later this year, Ice Lake-SP CPUs are going to host a range of new features such as a brand new chip architecture, improved I/O, and an enhanced software stack powering Intel’s first 10nm server lineup.

Intel Ice Lake-SP ‘Next-Gen Xeon’ CPUs Detailed – Feature 10nm+ Sunny Cove Cores & Advanced Capabilities

The Intel Ice Lake-SP is officially launching later this year on the Whitley platform. The platform will scale to single and dual-socket servers. In its presentation, Intel unveiled a 28 core Ice Lake-SP CPU as an example to demonstrate the enhanced capabilities that Ice Lake-SP offers over Cascade Lake-SP.

Intel has not confirmed if the 28 core CPU they showcased is the highest core count that will be available with the Ice Lake-SP family or if there would be higher core count variants. Earlier rumors do point to higher core counts so this 28 core die could just be used for comparison with the top of the stack 2nd Gen Xeon CPUs available today.

Intel Ice Lake-SP ‘Next-Gen CPU’ CPU Architecture

Coming to the details, Intel mentions that its Ice Lake-SP CPUs are fabricated on the 10nm+ process and not the 10nm++ process which is utilized by the Tiger Lake CPUs which launch next month. The Ice Lake-SP family will make use of the Sunny Cove cores which deliver up to 18% IPC increase over the Skylake architecture which all 14nm Xeon CPUs utilize.

The Sunny Cove architecture, in general, adds a range of improvements over Cascade Lake or the enhanced Skylake cores such as:

Improved Front end: higher capacity and improved branch predictor

Wider and deeper machine: wider allocation and execution resources + larger structures

Enhancements in TLBs, single-thread execution, prefetching

Server enhancements – larger Mid-level Cache (L2) + second FMA

Intel also adds in a range of new SIMD instructions exclusive to the Sunny Cove server processors that are mainly meant to increase performance in Cryptography and compression/decompression workloads. That along with enhanced software and algorithmic support will allow Intel gains of up to 8X per core over Cascade Lake.

Intel Ice Lake-SP ‘Next-Gen CPU’ 28 Core Die & Whitley Platform Detailed

Looking at the block diagram of the Ice Lake-SP 28 core CPU, the chip offers a new interconnect in the form of an enhanced Mesh Fabric which runs through all of the 28 CPU cores. The Ice Lake-SP die features two 4-channel memory controllers whereas the Cascade Lake-SP die offered two tri-channel memory controllers.

The Intel Ice Lake-SP processors also feature four PCIe Gen 4 controllers, each offers 16 Gen 4 lanes for a total of 64 lanes on the 28 core die. The Cascade Lake-SP chips offered hexa-channel memory support while Ice Lake-SP will offer octa-channel memory support on the Whitley platform at launch. The platform will be able to support up to DDR4-3200 MHz memory (16 DIMM per socket with 2nd Gen persistent memory support.

Intel is also adding a range of latency and coherence optimizations to Ice Lake-SP chips. But you can see that the memory bandwidth-latency gets a big jump with the 8-channel memory interface and the higher DIMM speeds.

Intel Ice Lake-SP ‘Next-Gen CPU’ New Interconnect Infrastructure

In addition to the standard Mesh interconnect, Intel has further expanded its interconnect design for Ice Lake-SP Xeon CPUs. The new control fabric and data fabric do connect with the cores and different controllers of the chip but also manage the data flower and power control for the chips themselves. These new interconnects will deliver even lower latency and faster clock updates than 3rd Gen Cooper Lake-SP chips. For example, the core frequency transition takes 12us and the mesh frequency transition takes 20us on Cascade Lake-SP chips. Ice Lake-SP in comparison takes less than 1us and 7us, respectively.

The less frequency drain means higher efficiency over Cascade Lake. Ice Lake-SP will also improve upon the AVX frequency since not all AVX-512 workloads consume higher power. This also isn’t specific to just AVX-512. Even AVX-256 instructions on Ice Lake-SP will deliver better frequencies profile over Cascade Lake CPUs.

Some of the major upgrades that 10nm will deliver include:

2.7x density scaling vs 14nm

Self-aligned Quad-Patterning

Contact Over Active Gate

Cobalt Interconnect (M0, M1)

1st Gen Foveros 3D Stacking

2nd Gen EMIB

The Intel Ice Lake-SP lineup would be directly competing against AMD’s enhanced 7nm based EPYC Milan lineup which will feature the brand new 7nm Zen 3 core architecture which is confirmed to be one of AMD’s biggest architectural upgrade since the original Zen core. Expect to see more Intel & NVIDIA based servers in the coming months.

This is AMD’s secret weapon against Intel and it could change personal computing forever

AMD’s big announcement this week was the launch of the new Ryzen 3000 XT CPUs – a stopgap between the current generation and the Ryzen 4000 series expected to launch later this year.

Tucked away at the foot of the press release is mention of something that might become a fundamental part of AMD’s toolset, sooner rather than later, as it seeks to compete more sustainably with arch nemesis Intel.

TechRadar Pro covered the launch of AMD StoreMi back in April, but version 2.0 has now been announced and will include “a new caching-based acceleration algorithm that enhances data integrity and prioritizes most-used data, speeding up boot times by up to 31% and decreasing game load times by up to 13% vs an HDD only”.

The tests were carried out using a hard drive of unknown capacity (or spinning speed) with a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD, again of unknown origin. In reality, you should be able to mix and match any sort of storage, regardless of whether it is magnetic or not.

No RAMDisk yet

Sadly, this version of StoreMI doesn’t (yet) include the Radeon RAMDisk, which would achieve the Holy Grail of allowing RAM and storage to mix, similar to what Intel has done with Optane.

We still believe this facility will arrive at some point, but why? Well, AMD has been working very closely with Microsoft on the brand new Xbox Series X gaming console and one of the biggest leaps in performance has come from moving to a new storage system that combines software (DirectStorage) with customized hardware. 

It turns out that DirectStorage is something Microsoft plans to bring to Windows as well, as it can reduce the processor overhead from I/O operations from multiple cores to just a fraction of a single core. While it will not be tied to any custom hardware, AMD is likely to benefit due to the modular nature of its CPU architecture.

So where does that leave us? In a not-so-distant future, one can imagine an AMD system that pools together all the available memory/storage resources, managed intelligently in a way that’s far more efficient than what Windows 10 achieves with Virtual Memory, the part of your storage component the operating system uses as RAM.

All this is pure speculation, of course, but the fact AMD has dedicated resources to StoreMi makes us optimistic about its future.

Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake-S Desktop CPU Final Specifications & Prices Leak Out – Core i9-10900K 10 Core For $488 US, Core i7-10700K 8 Core For $374 US, Core i5 6 Core Starting at $150 US

The final specifications & prices of Intel’s upcoming 10th Generation Comet Lake-S Desktop CPU family have leaked out by Videocardz. The information confirms the details that we already knew but the most important thing covered in this leak is the prices that show that Intel has definitely given its Core lineup a major overhaul in terms of price/positioning to tackle AMD’s Ryzen 3000 processors.

Intel’s 10th Generation Desktop CPU Family Specifications & Prices Leak Out – Core i9-10900K With 10 Cores For $488 US, i7-10700K With 8 Cores For $374 US

Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S Desktop CPUs and the accompanying Z490 platform are expected to be unveiled on 30th April and will be introduced on retail shelves on the 20th of May.

Update: HD-Tecnologia has also leaked the latest slides and shown us the pictures of Intel’s latest box packaging for its 10th Generation Desktop CPUs. While the dodecahedron packaging for 9th Gen Core i9 desktop CPUs looked great, I think the more simplistic box-shaped package with a nice mirror cut design looks even better.

The Intel Comet Lake-S or the 10th Generation Core Family is expected to be the last CPU lineup to reuse the 14nm Skylake architecture. The Skylake architecture has been with us since 2015 and Intel has yet to replace it for desktop consumers. The architecture has seen several optimizations and key refinements that have led to an increase from 4 cores and 8 threads to 10 cores and 20 threads. The same 14nm process has also been improved to the point that the flagship CPU speeds have seen a massive jump from 4.20 GHz boosts to 5.30 GHz boosts.

There are three SKUs in the unlocked lineup which is one less than what we were told. There’s the flagship Core i9-10900K which is followed by the Core i7-10700K and the Core i5-10600K. The Core i3 variant is missing but it’s such a crucial SKU that would be targetting a very competitive market and it would be a bad decision for Intel to not launch an unlocked quad-core part in the budget tier segment.

Intel Core i9-10900K – 10 Cores, Up To 5.3 GHz Single-Core, 4.9 GHz All-Core at $488 US

The Intel Core i9-10900K will be the flagship part of the 10th Generation Desktop CPU family. Intel has a few tricks up their sleeves to offer even better performance than the Core i9-9900KS. The i9-10900K features 10 cores, 20 threads a total cache of 20 MB and a 125W TDP. The chip has a base frequency of 3.7 GHz and a boost frequency of 5.1 GHz. However, using Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology, the chip can boost up to 5.2 GHz on a single-core and what’s even better is the 4.9 GHz all-core boost. Some of the features of this particular chip include:

Up to 4.8 GHz All-Core Turbo

Up to 5.3 / 4.0 GHz Thermal Velocity Boost Singe / All-core Turbo

Up to 5.2 GHz Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0

Up to 10C and 20T

Up to DDR4-2933 MHz dual-channel

Enhanced Core & Memory Overclocking

Active Core Group Tuning

Here’s the interesting part, the chip would also get Thermal Velocity Boost, similar to the current flagship parts. CPUs that support this algorithm, like the Core i9-10900K, would feature even faster boost frequencies of 5.3 GHz (single-core) and 4.9 GHz (all-core). However, as the name suggests, only top-tier cooling solutions would be able to allow full utilization of the Thermal Velocity Boost feature. So unless you rock a high-end AIO liquid cooler or a closed-loop setup, don’t expect a sustained velocity boost but rather short bursts until the threshold is hit. It will be interesting to know the full extent of the features that this function has to offer and what kind of cooling would the Core i9-10900K requires in general. A few benchmarks of the Core i9-10900K versus the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU can be found here.

Intel Core i7-10700K – 8 Cores, Up To 5.1 GHz Single-Core, 4.7 GHz All-Core at $374 US

The Intel Core i7-10700K would be featuring 8 cores and 16 threads. The chip would house 16 MB of total cache and a TDP of 125W. The chip would feature a base clock of 3.8 GHz, a boost clock of 5.0 GHz (single-core), and 5.1 GHz (single-core) with Turbo Boost Max 3.0. The chip will be 100 MHz faster in single-core but slower across all-cores by 100 MHz than the Core i9-9900K which retails for over $500 US. Since this is an i7 part, expect pricing to fall around $350-$400 US.

Intel Core i5-10600K – 6 Cores, Up To 4.8 GHz Single-Core, 4.5 GHz All-Core at $262 US

The Intel Core i7-10600K would be featuring 6 cores and 12 threads. The chip would house 12 MB of total cache and a TDP of 125W. The chip would feature a base clock of 4.1 GHz, a boost clock of 4.8 GHz (single-core), and 4.5 GHz (all-core). The chip would be faster than the 8th Gen flagship, the Core i7-8700K, featuring a higher base and boost clock across a single and all-cores. The Core i5 should be retailing in the $220-$270 US segment which is a decent price for a fast 6 core and multi-threaded chip.

Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake-S 65W Desktop CPU Family

The rest of the lineup is made up of the 65W SKUs which come in Core i9, Core i7, Core i5, and Core i3 flavors. Having a 65W Core i9-10900 with 10 cores and 20 threads which still boosts up to 4.5GHz across all cores and 4.6 GHz if you include the Thermal Velocity boost is pretty good plus 5.2 GHz on a single-core doesn’t sound that bad at all, considering this is a 65W chip (at its base frequency).

The Intel Core i3 lineup is also worth pointing out as it is made up of 3 SKUs which seem to be part of the initial launch family. The Core i3-10320 would be leading with 4 cores, 8 threads at 65W. 8MB of cache, clocks of up to 4.6 GHz with a single-core, and 4.4 GHz on all-cores sound decent enough for what is supposed to be a budget chip retailing under $150US. The full list of SKUs along with their specs can be seen in the table below.

400-Series Platform and LGA 1200 Socket Support

The Comet Lake-S family would also move to a new socket known as LGA 1200. While the LGA 1200 socket has the same dimensions as the LGA 1151 socket (37.5mm x 37.5mm), the socket keying has shifted to the left side and Comet Lake is no longer electrically or mechanically compatible with Coffee Lake motherboards. Some details of the new LGA 1200 package and socket for Comet Lake:

Comet Lake will transition to a higher pin-count package

Comet Lake LGA will not have backward compatibility with legacy platforms

No changes to ILM dimensions or thermal solution retention

Comet Lake LGA improves power delivery and support for future incremental I/O features

Pin 1 orientation remains the same, but socket keying has shifted left

The good thing is that your existing coolers would still be compatible with the LGA 1200 socket so that’s one hardware change you shouldn’t be worrying about. The Comet Lake-S family will retain support for DDR4-2666 memory UDIMM and support up to 32 GB capacity DIMMs per channel.

Intel plans to have several chipsets deployed in the 400-series family. There would obviously be Z490 which will target the ‘K’ unlocked SKUs I mentioned above, but aside from that, we are looking at the W480 (Entry Workstation), Q470 (Corporate with Intel vPro), and H410 (Value) chipsets. These would target more corporate and entry tier users. Also interesting to note is that H410 is not pin-compatible with W480 and Q470 chipsets, which reveals a very cut down design for the entry-level chip.

Following are some of the main platform features of the 10th Generation Comet Lake-S family:

Up To 10 processor cores for enhanced performance

Up To 30 PCH-H High-Speed I/O lanes for port flexibility

Up To 40 PCIe 3.0 Lanes (16 CPU, up to 24 PCH)

Media & Display features for premium 4K content support

Integrated + Discrete Intel Wireless-AC (Wi-Fi/BT CNVi) Support

Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) Support

Enhanced Core and memory overclock

Integrated USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 (10 Gb/s) support

Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST)

Programmable (Open FW SDK) Quad-Core Audio DSP

C10 & S0ix Support for Modern Standby

While there would be a range of new overclocking features, Intel has also revealed that they will be thinning out the die of 10th Gen Desktop CPUs, offering more IHS space for the CPU to make use of to dissipate heat. Intel is calling it the Thin Die STIM design and is stated to improve the overall CPU thermal performance.

In terms of chipset features, W480 would be the most feature-rich of the three chipsets that are mentioned here. Z490 would be the most appealing for the enthusiast and gaming audience, but let’s take a look at the mainstream chipsets. The W480 chipset would offer a total of 46 high-speed IO lanes and a total of 40 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes. The CPUs would retain 16 lanes with the chipset offering up to 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes.

There would be support for up to 8 SATA III ports, 8 USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports or 10 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, 14 USB 3.2 Gen ports, and Intel RST. Neither of the three chipsets would feature overclock support since that is restricted to the Z490 chipset but we will get more information on overclocking later on from Intel themselves. 

Intel has definitely adjusted the prices of various processors in its lineup. The Core i9-10900K with 10 cores actually features a lower price point than the $500 US+ Core i9-9900KS while being lower in price which is a great thing for consumers who were waiting to buy one. The rest of the prices are also great and the only thing that needs to be seen now is how they fare against AMD’s Ryzen 3000 in actual benchmark tests. We will know what kind of value proposition the Intel 10th Gen Core lineup holds against the AMD Zen 2 based family on the 20th of May.

Intel 10th Gen Laptop CPU at 5 GHz Spotted Before Release

The Intel Core i9-10880H, which should be the direct successor to last year’s i9-9880H, hasn’t been announced yet, but benchmarks results are already creeping up. Hardware leaker @_rogame reportedly found the upcoming mobile chip in a 3DMark submission yesterday.

The i9-10880H (codename Comet Lake-H) is expected to arrive sporting eight cores and 16 threads like its predecessor. Besides the improved clock speeds, there isn’t any significant architectural changes with Comet Lake over the i9-10880H’s Coffee Lake. Therefore, we expect the i9-10880H to retain the same 16MB of L3 cache as the i9-9880H. Being a H-series part, the 14nm processor will likely operate within the 45W envelope.

According to the 3DMark entry, the i9-10880H could come with a base clock fixed at 2.3 GHz, which is the same base clock on the prior i9-9980H. The only thing that the i9-10880H has going for it is the higher boost clock. If the 3DMark’s report is accurate, the i9-10880H will flex a 5 GHz boost clock, which is 200 MHz higher than the i9-9980H but only by 4.2%.

With the previous generation, Intel offered consumers the i9-9980H and faster i9-9980HK. The latter operates with a 100 MHz and 200 MHz higher base and boost clocks, respectively. It’s plausible that Intel would release a i9-10880HK with slightly faster clocks.

So far, the i9-10980HK has appeared with a 3.1 base clock and 5.27 GHz boost clock in unconfirmed benchmarks. Given the huge gap between the i9-10980HK and i9-10880H’s specifications, there’s certainly room for a i9-10880HK to slide in between. 

The i9-10880H and i9-10980HK should be very popular choices for upcoming high-performance mobile workstations and gaming laptops. However, they’ll have to compete with AMD’s Ryzen 4000-series (codename Renoir) chips, such as the Ryzen 9 4900H and Ryzen 7 4800H.

Intel Readies Core i9-10990XE With 22 Cores & 44 Threads – 380W TDP Design & Up To 5 GHz All-Core Boost

While Intel’s X299 may not have much fuel left in it against the Ryzen or Threadripper parts, Intel still seems to be focusing their attention on the 3-year-old platform in the HEDT space if the latest rumors are to be believed, readying yet another 10th Gen Core i9 CPU.

Intel’s Core i9-10990XE Rumored To Feature 22 Cores, 44 Threads, 380W TDP & The Power To Turn Your PC Into A Nuclear Reactor

Yep, you heard it all, according to Computerbase, Intel’s board partners have revealed that the blue giant is working on yet another 10th generation HEDT CPU. It looks like Intel wasn’t that impressed with the glowing reviews that the Core i9-10980XE received so they have or are deciding to offer a new chip with an even cooler (or hotter in this case) name, the Core i9-10990XE. The CPU is stated to be in the early validation stage.

Ok so coming to the specifications of this not so mysterious chip, we are looking at 22 cores and 44 threads. It seems like the processor features the XCC (Extreme Core Count) die instead of the HCC (High Core Count) die that is featured on existing 10th Gen HEDT parts. The HCC die maxes out at 18 cores and 36 threads while the XCC die maxes out at 28 cores and 56 threads. This is why extra validation is required because an XCC die won’t just magically work on an LGA 2066 socket & there have to be a few key design changes to accommodate the new chip. There’s also going to be 30.25 MB of L3 cache on this chip.

Intel 10th Gen Core i9 ‘Cascade Lake’ X-Series CPU Lineup

In terms of clocks, another rumor on Chiphell (via Videocardz) states that this chip has a 4.0 GHz all-core frequency out of the box with a TDP of 380W. This is almost twice the TDP figure of an Intel Core i9-10980XE. But here’s the interesting part, it is said to boost to 5.0 GHz across all cores making it sound a hell of a lot like the Core i9-9990XE which had a 5.0 GHz all-core boost clock and a TDP of 255W. But do keep this in mind that the 380W figure is just for the base frequency and this chip could actually consume over 1000 Watts of power from the socket considering the Core i9-9990XE consumed around 600-700 Watts of power when pushing all of its cores to 5.0 GHz and that was a 14 core part.

The folks over at Chiphell were kind enough to show us the performance figures of the chip in the Cinebench R20 benchmark (even if they might not be real), scoring up to 14000 points which puts it slightly ahead of the 24 core Ryzen Threadripper 3960X. Now the two things to focus here would be whether Intel will offer this chip around the $1500 or the $2000 US bracket. $1500 would make it a great choice for users who want to stick the Intel route while benefitting from higher core clock that the 10990XE would have to offer over the Threadripper 3960X while a $2000 US pricing would make it another DOA part against the 3970X.

The other thing is the power draw and Intel might like to downplay by saying real HEDT users don’t care about power consumption (they might even come up with their own ‘Real World Power figures) but we will have to wait for more information about this chip. This processor would definitely be recommended for compatibility on the higher end X299 motherboards as the power delivery required to keep it up and running would have to be insane, just like the chip itself.