10-core Intel Comet Lake CPUs reportedly set for April announcement

(Image credit: Intel)

Intel Comet Lake's announcement date is swiftly approaching, according to recent rumours. El Chapuzas Informatico reports that Intel's long-awaited 10th Gen desktop CPUs will be announced on April 30, 2020. Although you'll have to wait until May to hear more on performance—and perhaps even longer to get your hands on 'em.

We're yet to hear final confirmation on Intel Comet Lake's release date from Chipzilla itself, so we'll take what we can get—and, regardless of the rumour mill, we don't expect Intel to hold off on its latest chips much longer. If you were to have told me last year that even by March 2020 we wouldn't have word one on Intel's 10th Gen on desktop, I'd have probably guessed at an April release date—I'd also hope you'd pre-warn me to buy more toilet paper.

The potential April announcement, with reviews and availability coming in May, also aligns with a May release for 400-series motherboard availability, which was posited earlier in the year. So, it's all coming together.

Intel Comet Lake is all but officially confirmed with up to 10 cores and 20 threads at this point. That would be the enthusiast Core i9 10900K, although we're expecting some quality six- and four-core chips with Hyperthreading down the stack. The Core i3 10100, for example, could be a four-core/eight-thread CPU ready to rival Skylake's Core i7s.

The Core i9 10900K has been shown to perform where you might expect from a chip with two extra cores and a light serving of extra MHz. Recent benchmarks dug out by TUM_APISAK on Twitter show the Core i9 10900K scoring only marginally higher than the Core i9 9900KS in Geekbench's single-core testing, but managing 11,390 to the 9th Gen chip's 9,458 in multithreaded tests.

But Intel's launch has been slightly overshadowed by the release of, what is claimed to be, Intel Rocket Lake's platform spec. The 14nm follow-up to Comet Lake is now expected to be a backport of the new and improved Core architecture set to enter the scene with 10nm mobile parts—likely Willow Cove.

So with Intel's Skylake refreshes potentially coming to an end relatively soon, how much interest will there be for Intel Comet Lake? These chips still stand a chance of delivering the highest frame rates in-game, even if you have to pay up for the privilege, and the entry-level processors could be a saving grace for budget gaming PC builds, so there's a chance these will find an audience somewhere—but that all really depends on what AMD Zen 3 is up to later this year.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.