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Rumor: Intel Comet Lake 10th-Gen CPUs Feature Up To 10 Cores, New LGA1200 Socket and
A leak courtesy of WCCFTech (which certainly has a spotty track record with leaks, it has to be said) has outed several purported Core i3, i5, i7, and i9 processors, all of which are expected to be based on the 14nm Comet Lake architecture. As with all unverified rumors, you should take this information with a shovelful of salt. That said, the expansive number of slides appear, at least on the surface, to be legitimate. However, there is no way for us to verify this information independently.
Though this information isn't necessarily new, much of it confirms previous leaks and assumptions about Comet Lake and 10th-Gen desktop CPUs: up to 10 cores that require a new 400-series chipset and LGA 1200 socket.
The leak comes in the form of presentation slides that appear to be from Intel's IoT (Internet of Things) Group. In terms of features and specifications, we see that Comet Lake could deliver up to 10 cores, 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes (not 4.0 sadly) from the CPU, and up to 40 total lanes thanks to 24 additional PCIe lanes that hang off the PCH.
The platform also purportedly supports WiFi 6, but that listing has been annotated with "Under Evaluation," meaning it may not make it into the final revision of hardware. Another slide says Comet Lake will have 18% higher multi-threaded performance than Coffee Lake (no word on single thread). An 18% improvement is not as big as one might expect, given the 25% increase in core count.
Unsurprisingly, the high-end Core i9-10900 is a locked SKU (meaning without a K) has ten cores and 20 MB of cache, though curiously the slide says the chip will run at a mere 65-watt TDP. Both the Core i7-8700 and i9-9900 have a 65-watt TDP, so it wouldn't be surprising if Intel also slapped a 65-watt TDP on a 10-core CPU.
Down the line, it seems all of Intel's upcoming 10th-Gen CPUs will have Hyper-Threading and the i7, i5, and i3 branded products will have 8, 6, and 4 cores, respectively, which has been rumored and backed up by test submissions to public databases, for some time now. The leak also mentions several Xeon SKUs that are not properly named yet.
Finally, Intel is supposedly moving away from the LGA1151 socket to LGA1200, meaning Comet Lake will not be compatible with 300-series motherboards at all. The document lists the new 400-series chipsets as the Z490, the W480, the Q470, and the H410. Only Z490 supports overclocking, but W480 is otherwise identical. Q470 is missing a few SATA and USB ports, and H410 has the least lanes, USB ports, SATA ports, and display options.
According to the leak, all of this will come in the first half of 2020, which could be anywhere from January to June. Though we could not find anything obviously wrong or off about this leak, take it with some salt, same as any other leak. If this information is true, then it certainly confirms many previous Comet Lake leaks from earlier this year.
