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The next-gen Comet Lake-S desktop processors of Intel have been announced in a leak. The details suggested a full line-up and offering info about the power and efficiency of these chips. These processors are supposedly based on a refinement of its 14nm++ process, which will supposedly be headed up by a 10-core. It Comet Lake-S might be the Intel Core i9-10900 and purportedly runs with a base clock of 3GHz and Turbo to 5.1GHz. The new processor has 20MB of cache but the leak didn’t mention clock speed details for the unlocked K version of the chip. There is hyper-threading throughout the entire 10th-gen Core desktop family, from the Core i3 upwards.

The Core i3-10100 is a quad-core part with 8-threads and a base clock of 3.2GHz with Turbo to 3.8GHz. Intel’s Core i7-10700 will apparently sport 8-cores and 16-threads with a base clock of 3GHz and Turbo to 4.8GHz. The Core i5-10500 runs with 6-cores and 12-threads with a base clock of 3.2GHz and Turbo to 4.3GHz. Pentium chips remain dual-core CPUs with 4-threads. It is important that the Celeron processors at the very bottom of the 10th-gen range don’t get hyper-threading. The Comet Lake-S will support up to 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes, and comes with a new CPU socket (LGA 1200), but needs a motherboard upgrade.

The Core i9-10900 looks an impressive performer with an alleged headline Turbo speed of 5.1GHz, which as noted is presumably single-core. More interest and focus will be placed on the mainstream Core i5-10500 six-core CPU which looks to offer a 100MHz uptick on the Core i5-9600 in terms of base clock speed, albeit with slightly slower 300MHz lower Turbo. It would be a great deal but depends on exactly how Intel prices these chips when they emerge. The company will present these processors in the first quarter of 2020. It is noteworthy that Intel needs to do something to stop the rot in the enthusiast desktop CPU market.