Intel launched its 10nm chips earlier this year to a rather impressed audience. The IPC gains and Gen11 iGPU make the Ice lake CPUs a worthy upgrade. The problem, however, is that it’s really hard to get your hands on a device powered by one of these processors. As per sources, the 10nm parts are limited in quantity and the volume sales will be fulfilled by the Whiskey Lake and Comet Lake-U parts. Many of you are probably wondering about the 10th Gen mobile lineups, especially after this morning’s report that claimed Intel might not bring Ice Lake to the mainstream DIY space. We did a bit of digging and turns out, the Comet Lake-S desktop lineup will land in the first quarter of 2020.
As per a report from Twitter leaker (MOMOMO_US), the Comet Lake-S desktop lineup will be Intel’s answer to the AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs. Whether these new processors will suffice as an alternative to the Matisse chips is hard to say. From what we know, Comet Lake-S will more or less be similar to Coffee Lake, another rehash of the Skylake core on steroids. High clock speeds paired with a healthy IPC result in good gaming CPUs. Furthermore, unlike AMD’s Zen, Intel processors aren’t sensitive to memory or latency bound applications, giving them an edge in such workloads.
However, it’s not all that simple. AMD’s 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs pack a fat L3 cache, improved IPC and efficient TDPs that have been giving Intel’s Coffee lake parts more trouble than they ever expected. At this point, you’re probably wondering why Comet Lake might do something that Coffee Lake didn’t. Well, look at the Cascade Lake-X parts. They’re the same as their Skylake predecessors but much cheaper, and if recent rumors are anything to go by, Intel is planning to use the same strategy in the mainstream consumer space. After all, this isn’t the server space that it’ll have a drastic impact on the overall profits.
If the Comet Lake-S parts arrive at price points lower than the 9th Gen lineup but with better performance figures, then we’ll be hard-pressed to revise all our build guides and recommendation. AMD would almost certainly announce price cuts if that happens, making the DIY market ever so competitive. We
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