Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake Desktop CPUs Rumored to be Announced On April 30

News
By Zhiye Liu
published

Better late than never, right?

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Spanish news outlet El Chapuzas Informatico claims that Intel will announce the company's highly-anticipated 10th Generation Comet Lake desktop processors on April 30. However, benchmark and review embargoes reportedly won't lift until the second week of May. Approach the rumored dates with a bit of caution since we have no way to confirm them.

As we know from a string of test submissions to public databases, Comet Lake desktop chips will span up to 10 cores. This is certainly a first for Intel, but much of the chipmaker's shine will be overshadowed by AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X that offes up to 16 cores on a mainstream platform. That's not to mention that AMD has already transitioned to the 7nm node with its Ryzen 3000-series (codename Matisse) chips while Comet Lake is still on Intel's old 14nm process node.

The upcoming Comet Lake chips will not only have to face the stiff competition from AMD, but they'll have an even harder time convincing consumers of their worth. Preliminary tray pricing shows that Comet Lake parts could be up to 12% more expensive in comparison to the previous Coffee Lake chips. This was to expected since Intel wouldn't just give away more cores for free. 

The premium on the additional cores is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Due to the power requirements, Comet Lake commands a new motherboard that will be built around Intel's fresh LGA1200 socket and corresponding 400-series chipsets. Although we've questioned Intel's decision in the past, this generation of processors might justify the motherboard upgrade. 

Early rumors from January suggest that flagship 10-core Comet Lake processor could pull up to 300W of peak power. The claims are credible as we've learned that the PL2 (Power Level 2)  for that SKU is 250W. Months later, T-series chips, such as the Core i5-10500T and Core i7-10700T popped up in the SiSoftware database with peak power consumptions of 92W and 123W, respectively. These samples are unreleased silicon, so we should take the specifications with a bit of salt.

If El Chapuzas Informatico's information is legit, we won't have to wait long for the answers to all our Comet Lake questions.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

See more CPUs News
12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • st379
    Is this a reliable source or this site beoming the new wccftech?

    Because in the article "Approach the rumored dates with a bit of caution since we have no way to confirm them. ".
    It is not like we don't know everthing about this "new" excitnig skylake cpu already.

    Lga 1200, 14nm++++++++++, skylake architecture, same performance with slightly better boost.

    There is no need for rumors. Everyone knows how skylake perform because it is in the market for 3 years.

    If this is the exact release date so I am happy to know but it does not sound like that from the article.
    Reply
  • Deicidium369
    st379 said:
    Is this a reliable source or this site beoming the new wccftech?

    Because in the article "Approach the rumored dates with a bit of caution since we have no way to confirm them. ".
    It is not like we don't know everthing about this "new" excitnig skylake cpu already.

    Lga 1200, 14nm++++++++++, skylake architecture, same performance with slightly better boost.

    There is no need for rumors. Everyone knows how skylake perform because it is in the market for 3 years.

    If this is the exact release date so I am happy to know but it does not sound like that from the article.
    You can add as many + as you want, kid - this will still outsell everything AMD has. Funny how you deride Skylake - yet AMD has yet to reach parity with that ancient 3 year old architecture....
    Reply
  • st379
    Deicidium369 said:
    You can add as many + as you want, kid - this will still outsell everything AMD has. Funny how you deride Skylake - yet AMD has yet to reach parity with that ancient 3 year old architecture....
    It will perform better.... we all know it because of the 9900ks (special edition that no one can find) benchmarks.
    I asked if this rumor is even slightly correct, troll.
    Leave the guessing to wccftech.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Deicidium369 said:
    You can add as many + as you want, kid - this will still outsell everything AMD has.
    On the pre-built market where most buyers are basically going for updated versions of whatever they already had, sure. In the DIY space though, hardware sites and channels that periodically comment on things like results from Amazon affiliate links say AMD is out-selling Intel by 2-3X, which is in line with what Amazon rankings and sales stats from the few online stores that publish those also report.

    Intel may still have the crown for highest attainable frame rates at any cost but most people who aren't buying blind want more practical and cost-effective CPUs.
    Reply
  • TCA_ChinChin
    Deicidium369 said:
    You can add as many + as you want, kid - this will still outsell everything AMD has. Funny how you deride Skylake - yet AMD has yet to reach parity with that ancient 3 year old architecture....
    AMD has surpassed even Coffee-lake in everything except AVX in certain scenarios and FPS in certain scenarios. If those are the only things that matter, then I won't disagree.
    Reply
  • tiggers97
    Deicidium369 said:
    You can add as many + as you want, kid - this will still outsell everything AMD has. Funny how you deride Skylake - yet AMD has yet to reach parity with that ancient 3 year old architecture....

    If early benchmarks are to be believed... Not really. Single core slightly higher, and multi core still doesn't beat the 3900x. But more expensive because of the additional cores, and running hotter than the 9900k.

    https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2587

    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1584149
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    InvalidError said:
    On the pre-built market where most buyers are basically going for updated versions of whatever they already had, sure. In the DIY space though, hardware sites and channels that periodically comment on things like results from Amazon affiliate links say AMD is out-selling Intel by 2-3X, which is in line with what Amazon rankings and sales stats from the few online stores that publish those also report.
    Look in 2015 when AMD announced that ZEN was coming up AMD's revenue dropped like a stone, which is understandable because why would you buy bulldozer if ZEN is on the horizon, so whoever is buying ZEN is also just going for updated versions of whatever they already had.
    AMDs gross revenue is only slightly above 2010-2012 levels.
    https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/revenue
    While their net income is lower than what it was back then.
    I guess ZEN isn't quite as cheap to make as people like to think.
    https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/net-income
    Reply
  • PCWarrior
    Given that the launch of these processors was scheduled for March 30th, postponing announcement for exactly one month and launch for 6 weeks sounds plausible. However, I doubt the situation with the pandemic will get better by then, especially in the US where it is only just starting – if anything for many states the situation is expected to peak by then, unless a 6-week lockdown is enforced nationwide.

    TCA_ChinChin said:
    AMD has surpassed even Coffee-lake in everything except AVX in certain scenarios and FPS in certain scenarios. If those are the only things that matter, then I won't disagree.
    That’s certainly not true. First of all IPC is a per workload metric and the idea that AMD has superior IPC to Intel in every non-AVX workload is for the birds. Also, even if AMD cpus did have such a total IPC superiority (which they don’t) it is only a minor one and is more than offset by Intel’s clock speed advantage. So Intel still holds the single-threaded performance crown in most workloads and anything scalable only up to the number of cores/threads Intel is offering (hence quad-threaded, hexa-threaded, eight-threaded performance especially in an OCed vs OCed comparison).

    It should also be noted that AMD’s cpus even if they did have an IPC superiority is not something that should be attributed to the sheer brilliance of their microarchitecture. Zen2 is using double the amount of per core L2 cache (512KB Vs 256KB) and double the amount of per core L3 cache (4MB vs 2MB) compared to Skylake. Substantially increasing the capacity of your CPU memory subsystem is only a trick you can do once per 5-10 years. AMD is running out of cheap tricks and is time to actually improve the computationally efficiency of its core architecture than just relying on throwing more cores and more cache in order to mitigate the inherent deficiencies of its current design.

    And by the way, we hear so much about Intel cpus being supposedly insecure against exotic side-channel attacks but the ones who actually get actually badly hacked in the real world (and remotely) are AMD themselves and that with regular attacks! Not exactly confidence inspiring when a company selling cpus claiming to be secure has such a major hack and has their IP Verilog files stolen under their nose.
    Reply
  • mdd1963
    Looking forward to the next round of processors, as it's been rather boring since Ryzen 3000 series!

    Looking forward to seeing what the 10700K and 10900K bring to the gaming performance table!
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    mdd1963 said:
    Looking forward to seeing what the 10700K and 10900K bring to the gaming performance table!
    Until the GPUs catch up,nothing!
    Especially at 1440p and up...
    You can't get faster than what the GPU allows.
    Reply