Intel is prepping its 10th Gen Comet Lake-S CPUs for launch in the coming months. Another Skylake rehash like Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake, these parts will feature up to 10 cores and 20 threads. The same Gen9 iGPU will be retained, however. A higher core count along with boosted clocks should help Intel stay in-game, granted the prices are acceptable. Here’s something else. There are reports suggesting that even the 11th Gen lineup will use the same Skylake core.
Codenamed Rocketlake, the 11th Gen Core CPUs will feature just 8 cores at the top. The only major change will be the integration of the Gen12 LP graphics which is of little to no consequence in the DIY market. The TDPs are said to be the same as the present Coffee Lake-S parts but the memory support will be expanded to 2933MHz (native). LPDDR4X support has been increased to 3733MHz.
The first Intel architecture to support DDR5 will be Tiger Lake which will use a more mature form of the 10nm node presently used for Ice Lake-U and Y. However, at present, there is no ETA on a desktop lineup based on these 10nm architectures.
In a world where AMD plans to move to a 7nm+ node with an even better architecture than Zen 2, Intel is still prodding the six-year-old Skylake core. Some claim that Rocket Lake will be a backport of the Golden Cove or Sunny Cove but that is highly unlikely. We’ll also be seeing Rocket Lake in low-power notebooks as the U series chips.