We have been hearing about Intel's upcoming Comet Lake S desktop CPUs for a long time now, with numerous leaks and rumors making the rounds. Adding to the pile, a handful of official looking slides from Intel's related press deck have found their way to the web, and confirm the specs of three of Intel's top gaming chips.
Granted, nothing is ever truly official until there is an actual announcement or launch. Be that as it may, Intel has already launched Comet Lake in mobile form including Comet Lake-Y and Comet Lake-U CPUs for thin and light laptops, and Comet Lake-H processors for more powerful notebooks. The next destination is the desktop.
That is what the Comet Lake-S series will comprise. Model names and specifications have been floated around for quite some time now, but the newly leaked slides provide the strongest evidence yet of three specific SKUs.
Obtained by Videocardz, Intel's marketing materials outline high level specifications for the Core i9 10900K, Core i7-10700K, and Core i5 10600K. All three are unlocked processors (as denoted by the "K" designation), and two of them feature boost clocks in excess of 5GHz, according to the slides.
Here's a tidy breakdown:
- Core i9 10900K—10 cores / 20 threads, up to 5.3GHz
- Core i7-10700K—8 cores / 16 threads, up to 5.1GHz
- Core i5-10600K—6 cores / 12 threads, up to 4.8GHz
The full specifications will be more nuanced than what the slides indicate. For example, the 5.3GHz claim attached to the 10900K comes by way of Intel's Thermal Velocity Boost technology, which "opportunistically" pushes past the regular boost clock "whenever processor temperature and turbo budget allows."
You can think of TVB as a quick burst of adrenaline for your CPU. For it to engage, you will need adequate cooling.
The slides say nothing of the regular Turbo clocks, though if putting stock into previous leaks, the 10900K will feature a 5.1GHz single-core Turbo clock, 5.2GHz Turbo 3.0 clock, and 4.8GHz all-core Turbo clock.
The remaining CPUs in the Comet Lake-S lineup have not been highlighted in any leaked slide decks, only occasionally (and loosely) outlined in early retailer listings and the odd benchmark. But you can be sure the entire lineup from i7 to i3 will be available at some point, equipped with HyperThreading throughout for double the thread counts.
Multiple sites claim to have heard that Intel will introduce its Comet Lake-S CPUs on April 30. It's also rumored that the actual release date—the day the CPUs will go on sale and Intel's embargo on performance reviews gets lifted—will be nearly a month later, on May 27.
