Intel Core i9-10980HK hits 5.27 GHz on Geekbench while surpassing the Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX in multi-core performance

The Core i9-9980HK is already a powerful processor, provided that it is cooled appropriately. We have seen the chip score 28,625 points in Geekbench 4.4, for example, which puts it on par with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X. Incidentally, the Core i9-9880H outperformed its HK sibling, with it averaging 29,077 in the same benchmark.

However, the Core i9-10980HK has already shown that it can handily score over 30,000 in Geekbench, as we reported a few days ago. While the Ryzen 7 4800H can hold its own against the Core i9-10980HK, the latter still manages to outperform the likes of the Threadripper 2970WX, a 24 core desktop part.

While comparing laptop and desktop processors is not necessarily the fairest of comparisons, the Core i9-10980HK appears to offer about 10% better multi-core performance than its predecessor. The Comet Lake-H chip still has eight cores and supports Intel Hyperthreading though, so the performance improvement is not coming from increased core or thread counts. Likewise, the Core i9-10980HK is a 45 W processor with 16 MB of L3 cache, just like the Core i9-9980HK.

Instead, Intel has bumped up the clock speeds, with the Core i9-10980HK hitting 5.27 GHz on Geekbench. By contrast, the Core i9-9980HK maxes out at 5.0 GHz. Additionally, the Core i9-10980HK has a 3.1 GHz base clock, a 700 MHz increase over the Core i9-9980HK.

The Core i9-10980HK should start arriving in laptops by the summer. It will be interesting to see how it compares against the Ryzen 7 4800H though, of which we are expecting big things.