Intel Expands 10th Gen CPU Lineup With A Slew Of New Comet Lake Chips
Today, Intel is expanding its 10th Gen processor lineup with Comet Lake-based processors. Unlike Ice Lake, however, these new Comet Lake processors continue to be based on existing 14nm++ process technology. A total of 8 processors have been announced covering both Y-Series (as low as 4.5W for fanless designs or as high as 9W) and U-Series (configurable at 15W or 25W) product families.
We can think of Comet Lake as a turbocharged version of Whiskey Lake featuring higher clocks across the board. In addition, the 10th Gen Comet Lake family adds a 6-core option for the first time. A new on-board memory controller adds support for efficient LPDDR4x memory, and DDR4-2666 memory speeds are now supported, offering increased bandwidth. This coupled with single-core turbo frequencies that top out at 4.9GHz means that Intel is promising some healthy performance gains over Whiskey Lake.
Intel is quoting an overall 16 percent performance uplift compared to Whiskey Lake. In productivity apps like Office 365, Intel's projecting up to a 45 percent performance lift. Part of that increase can be attributed to the higher clocks, architectural improvements, and the enhanced memory controller; but we should also mention that Intel is using the Core i7 -10710U (6-core/12-thread) in this case, which will of course boost multitasking operations as well with additional cores.
Like the already launched Ice Lake processors, the Comet Lake family brings support for all of the latest connectivity technologies including Thunderbolt 3 (up to four ports supported, each at 40Gb/sec) and Wi-Fi 6 with WPA3 security. Comet Lake processors also fully support Intel Adaptix technology which combines modern standby and faster wake speeds with support for Amazon Alexa. Dynamic Tuning Technology, which is part of Adaptix, allows OEMs to boost performance by an additional 12 percent through the use of pre-trained AI algorithms for predicting system workloads.
Buying a new laptop is going to be quite interesting in the coming months, if you're looking at an Intel-based system. We'll have Whiskey Lake, Ice Lake, and Comet Lake systems competing at intersecting price points with similar performance profiles in some cases. It should be an interesting head-to-head matchup with Ice Lake versus Comet Lake, especially with the latter's advantage with clock speeds and multi-core performance. But we'll have to wait until we can get shipping systems in our lab before we can give any concrete analysis on that that front, so stay tuned.
