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.