Intel 10th gen Comet Lake-S qualifying samples get listed on Chinese website signaling an impending release

We've reported earlier about Intel's plans of launching the Comet Lake-H and Comet Lake-S series as early as March 2020 to possibly counter AMD's advances in desktop and mobile. Now, it looks like that may indeed happen as trays of Intel Comet Lake-S CPUs were briefly put up for sale on a Chinese e-tailer site.

First spotted by known leakster @momomo_us, these 10th gen Comet Lake-S chips were being sold on a Chinese e-tailer site named Taobao. The sample specification (sSpec) number on these chips indicates that these are actually qualifying samples (QS) that are seeded to OEMs and ISVs. It is surprising that someone could actually manage to get so many QS chips for retail sale.

The Taobao page (now taken down) lists five Comet Lake-S processors: Core i5-10400, Core i5-10500, and Core i5-10600K all of which are 6-core 12-thread parts. With the exception of the Core i5-10600K, which is rated at 95W, the rest have a 65W TDP. The seller seems to have stocked the Core i9-10900 and the Core i9-10900K as well. 

Folks over at the Chinese news site XFastest managed to get their hands on a Core i9-10900 chip. It is not known whether they purchased it from Taobao or Intel sent them a sample. What's intriguing is that the Core i9-10900 has 2.5 GHz inscribed on it contrary to previous reports indicating the processor to have a 2.9 GHz base clock. 

Now that some people actually have access to the 10th gen Comet Lake-S series, we expect some performance numbers leaks in the run up to launch. One thing to be noted here is that Comet Lake-S requires new motherboards with an LGA 1200 socket and a 400-series chipset such as the Z490 or the B460. Therefore, even if the Taobao seller wanted to sell these Comet Lake-S QS chips, buyers would have to wait before the first 400-series chipset-based boards become available.