[The Exiled]

Intel launches new Comet Lake 10th Gen mobile processors with up to 6 Cores + LPDDR4X memory

Today, Intel is launching more 10th Gen processors. Those processors, however, are not based 10 nanometer Ice Lake but instead what’s essentially another 14 nanometer refresh – with a minor twist. Intel says that over 90 designs are on their way to hitting retail shelves for the holiday season this year. When comparing the two 10th Gen architectures, Intel is positioning Comet Lake above Ice Lake when it comes to productivity tasks. They clock much higher and Intel is offering up to six cores with Comet Lake. Likewise, Ice Lake is positioned slightly below Comet Lake in the product stack with only up to four cores and slightly lower frequencies – albeit on improved Sunny Cove cores – but with a new I/O Thunderbolt 3 subsystem and a fairly powerful integrated graphics. Comet Lake is very much another refresh, building on top of Whiskey Lake U. Intel’s low-power processors for this generation are going to be a mix of both 14nm parts based on their venerable Skylake CPU architecture, as well as 10nm Ice Lake parts incorporating Intel’s new Sunny Cove CPU architecture, with the 14nm Comet Lake parts filling in the gaps that Ice Lake alone can’t meet.

Comet Lake-S with 10 cores and LGA-1200 for early 2020

After the presentation of the mobile variants aka Comet Lake-U and Comet Lake-Y, more details on the desktop version have surfaced. This is once more the talk of models with up to ten cores, which is likely to be one of the distinguishing feature of the Comet Lake-S processors. The power consumption is listed at 35, 65 and 125W - similar to what we currently see at Coffee Lake-S. Another important innovation is likely to be the platform on which Comet Lake-S will operate. As with the mobile variants, Intel refers to the chipset as one of the 400 series and also the socket is a new: LGA-1200. So, if you want to change to Comet Lake-S, you'll need a new motherboard - but that too had already come out in the past few months. Comet Lake-S is almost entirely based on the Skylake architecture, and accordingly, there will not be much performance leaps in the individual cores. Presumably, Intel will be able to turn something on the clock screw by a continuously improved manufacturing in 14nm - which it should have been. In any case, there are no changes in the number of PCI Express lanes that are made available directly via the processor. Here it stays with 16 PCI Express 3.0 lanes. Also, the memory controller, Intel has apparently not touched, because it is still spoken by dual-channel DDR4-2666. In the case of the mobile variants Comet Lake-U and Comet Lake-Y, however, Intel made changes to the memory controller because the U variants now support LPDDR4-2933, which was not expected in this form.

Cascade Lake-X Core i9 10000X HEDT for LGA-2066 listed - 18 cores, but 48 PCIe lanes

Of course, everybody knows that Core i9 10000 X-Series is inbound as Intel has been talking about it ever since Computex, but this is the first appearance in a spec page of it. Interesting is that it is noted as a 48 lane PCIe 3.0 CPU, yes 3.0. The current top model Core i9 9980XE has 44 PCIe-lanes for the flagship model. So that's four more lanes from the processor. The 10000 series, with up to 18 cores, is based on Cascade Lake-X, which is a derivative Skylake-X at 14nm process. Thus far Intel has not made clear yet if the new processors are hardened for the recent vulnerabilities. If they are re-using a revamped Skylake-X architecture, that'll probably be the case. Intel will also be bumping up default memory frequency support towards DDR4-2933. The document also mentions that a second m.2 slot works with a 'Core i9 10000 X-Series' processor, meaning. So Intel added four more lanes just for full speed x4 PCIe Gen3 M2 support. You will have noticed the new naming, Intel now is using five digits for their future model numbers much like the comet lake laptop procs announced earlier this week.

Izvor: AnandTech, WikiChip Fuse, Hardwareluxx i Guru3D