Opinion | The Core i5-10300H shows that Intel keeps flogging the dead horse that is its 14 nm process

Intel has definitely got its money's worth from its 14 nm process, with the company having repeatedly optimised it since the release of the Broadwell architecture in 2014. Some revisions have brought noticeable performance improvements, though. More recently, the introduction of Hyper-Threading to its Core i5 H-series processors brought upwards of 18% better multi-core performance, for example, with the Core i5-8300H outscoring the Core i5-6300HQ by about 31% in Cinebench R15 Multi 64Bit, too.

However, the Core i5-10300H looks unlikely to outscore the Core i5-9300H by the same margin, though. According to Laptopmedia, which has gotten an early look at the Comet Lake-H chip, the Core i5-10300H outscored its predecessor by about 11% in CB R20 Multi 64Bit, an improvement that it claims is a "decent performance boost".

The headline figure does not tell the whole story, though. The website claims that the Core i5-10300H has a 2.5 GHz base clock speed that it can Turbo Boost to 4.3 GHz, a boost of between 100 and 200 MHz over the Core i5-9300H. Undoubtedly, these minor clock speeds improvements will help the Core i5-10300H outperform the Core i5-9300H to a degree, but so will adding support for DDR4-3200 RAM.

So, the Core i5-10300H can outperform the Core i5-9300H by up to 11% when also paired with faster RAM. While we unable to verify at this stage how the former will perform with DDR4-2666 RAM, benchmarking the two chips on different RAM is not a fair comparison.

Worse still, Intel is persisting with the Intel UHD Graphics 630, a GPU that it first brought to its H-series two generations ago. Comet Lake-H may not be the last of Intel's 14 nm process for 45 W mobile chips either, which is a depressing thought.