The coronavirus pandemic did not prevent Intel from making, on Thursday (2), its first big announcement of 2020. The company has just revealed six new processors of the tenth generation of Core chips (Comet Lake-H). All are focused on performance, with an emphasis on the octa-core Intel Core i9-10980HK
The first Comet Lake models were announced in August 2019. They make up the U and Y series, which are mainly aimed at ultrabooks and convertible laptops focused on productivity.
The H series, which arrives now, is also aimed at laptops but has an emphasis on applications that require firepowers, such as heavy games, video editing, and image processing.
To emphasize the performance aspect, Intel made some comparisons between the recently announced Core i9-10980HK and Core i7-7820HK, a processor that, three years ago, was among the company’s most powerful in the segment.
These tests indicate, for example, that Core i9 has 54% more performance than Core i7 in the game Red Dead Redemption 2 running at 1080p. In Far Cry: New Dawn, also in 1080p, the Core i9-10980HK’s performance gain is 23%.
This is not to say that the new Comet Lake-H chips bring an abundance of innovations. The manufacturing technology remains 14 nanometers, for example. It is as if we have Skylake processors with optimized lithography and a series of increments, such as higher frequencies.
Really high. Of the six processors announced today, four reach the 5 GHz barrier. In turbo, they do. Let’s go to them:
In addition to being the toughest in the class, the Core i9-10980HK appears as the only model that is completely unlocked for overclocking (the i7-10850H is also unlocked, but partially). It is also worth mentioning that, with the exception of Core i5 models, all new chips have Thermal Velocity Boost. A technology capable of automatically raising the frequency up to 200 MHz when the processor temperature is equal to or below 65º C.
All six processors have features in common. Among them are support for Intel Optane memory, Wi-Fi 6 (Wi-Fi 802.11ax), SATA 3.0, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0a, Thunderbolt 3 (reaches up to 40 Gb / s), USB 2.0, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (which actually corresponds to USB 3.1) and PCI Express 3.0 (as it is, no PCIe 4.0).
Regarding RAM, all new chips work with up to 128 GB of DDR4 memory at frequencies up to 2,933 MHz and dual channel.
When will this news hit the market? The current pandemic scenario may change the pace of manufacturers’ launches, but, in an optimistic forecast, we can expect brands like Acer, Lenovo, Dell and MSI to launch the first notebooks with the new tenth-generation Core by the middle of the year.
