10-core Intel Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs spotted on Geekbench

Intel already launched the Comet Lake ULV processors earlier this fall, and these are aimed at laptops / mini PCs due to their lower TDPs. The desktop chips are expected to replace the current Coffee Lake-R models next year, but bear in mind that these will still use Intel’s 14 nm nodes, albeit the most refined version, and if we are to judge by the latest Geekbench 4 sightings, it looks like the gen 10 desktop models might not bring much of an upgrade.

While the current gen 9 desktop CPUs are still the best when it comes to gaming, they do not really stand a chance against AMD’s Ryzen 3000-series as far as multi-core productivity / content creation performance is concerned since the Zen 2 chips offer up to 16 cores and 32 threads. How is the gen 10 going to tackle this problem? According to the new Geekbench info, there will be a 10-core / 20-thread model, but if this is the top-of-the-line, then Intel is not really doing much to tackle the competition. Keep in mind that AMD will also release Zen 3 chips in 2020 and we could see mainstream processors with more than 16 cores by that time.

The Geekbench entries reveal that the 10-core / 20-thread model integrates 640 KB of L1 cache, 2.5 MB of L2 cache and 20 MB of L3 cache, with a 1.51 GHz base clock and 3.19 GHz boost clock. The 6-core model, on the other hand, gets lower specs with only 384 KB L1 cache, 1.5 MB L2 cache ,12 MB L3 cache and a boost clock limited to 2.89 GHz, while the base clock is bumped to 1.99 GHz. These models come equipped with UHD Graphics 630 iGPUs, and the graphics core frequency is higher on the 10-core (1.2 GHz) compared to the 6-core (1.15 GHz).

It is quite early to see such engineering samples pop on Geekench, so there is a possibility that the commercial versions could see improvements by launch time. We would have liked to see some benchmark scores, but, unfortunately, these were not included.