Rumors of Intel's upcoming desktop Comet Lake CPUs are raining down like cats and dogs. Today, Hong Kong media XFastest posted a video where it said the Intel Core i9-10900 ES was subjected to a handful of benchmarks, including a CPU-Z test and CineBench R15, ahead of its release.

Note that this is the "ES" version of the chip, meaning it's an engineering sample. Additionally, there's no "K" or "F," so this should bean overclockable CPU with internal graphics.


The video said the base clock speed of the chip is 2.5 GHz. That might seem low, but keep in mind that a lot of the leaks about Comet Lake desktop CPUs have pointed to lower nominal clock speeds with more reliance on boost. XFastest's video shows the chip boosting up to 4.4 GHz. The i9-10900 CPU is expected to pack 10 cores with Hyper-Threading for a total of 20 threads.

As far as performance goes, in Cinebench R20 the chip scored 3,714 points. This is a significant step below what the i9-10900F's rumored benchmark score, 4,781. But given that the specifications and boost frequencies seen in this benchmark are below those of earlier desktop Comet Lake rumors, we suspect that the low performance figures are due to the engineering sample status of the silicon and not representative of what customers will ultimately see.