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Comet Lake on desktop; Peloton bricks bikes; Big Navi rumors; encryption under threat; more….

JUST WHEN YOU thought Intel couldn’t push its aging 14nm Skylake microarchitecture any further, it does it again. AMD’s speedy Zen chips have left Intel little choice but to respond. The slow development of its 10nm Sunny Cove parts means, once again, it’s down to old faithful to fill the gap, now on its fourth refinement. Luckily, Skylake has proved its worth, and Intel is getting good at squeezing every drop out of it. Not that there is much juice left. Each iteration gains over the last by a lesser degree.

Comet Lake first appeared last year, disappointing us by only being low-power U series chips. Now we get the fullon S desktop and H laptop versions. Exact specs haven’t been officially announced, but there are engineering and qualifying samples about, along with enough slides and leaks to piece things together. There will be a full range of parts, essentially replacing the existing ninth-generation chips with 10th-gen parts, from the i3-10100 upward. There are a few upgrades, every chip gets HyperThreading, and there are a few (modest) speed hikes for boost modes. There’s no PCIe 4.0 support, though.

At the top of the tree will be the Core i9-10900K, with 10 cores, a base clock of 3.7GHz, 20MB of cache, and a maximum boost clock of 5.3GHz. The speed is thanks to Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost, which makes use of every bit of the thermal envelope you have. This speed isn’t guaranteed; it has an all-core boost of 4.8GHz, and a Max Turbo boost of 5.1GHz otherwise, making the i9-10900 6 percent faster (under ideal conditions), and with two more cores over the current speed champion, the 5GHz i9-9900K. It has a quoted TDP of 125W, but under load it can reportedly more than double this. There’s a number of F-series chips listed, too. These have had the integrated graphics deactivated. Early benchmarks have been mixed, but testing engineering samples isn’t always reliable. We will have to wait for stable systems and more reliable testing (that’s us).

You won’t be slotting these 10th-gen chips into your rig, though. We have a new socket standard: LGA 1200, with an extra 49 pins for power and I/O (more cores require more pins). A new socket also means a new motherboard chipset, in this case a 400-series Z490, B460, or H470. These are all ready to roll; the motherboard manufacturers have been waiting for the processors. Apparently, the bulk of the Comet Lake range has been ready for a while, but getting the fastest “halo” version running smoothly has delayed things. It’s the star performer that makes the headlines, so we’ve all had to wait.

One easy way to be competitive is to be cheaper. Leaked price lists show Intel is sticking pretty much to its existing structure—the 10th-generation parts will cost the same as the equivalent ninth-gen parts. Some pundits say that Intel is planning a round of reductions, but we’ve heard that before and nothing transpired. It’s unlikely that there will be much change. Supply is tight, and if you’re selling everything you make, there’s little incentive to sell it for less. Intel will cut prices when the heat is on. It recently took a chainsaw to a lot of its server and X-series parts, thanks largely to Threadripper’s growing share, but it takes more market pressure than there is in the desktop sector for that yet. So, expect that 10-core beast to be expensive.

We should see the new chips before the end of the summer, possibly even spring. Intel is having a hard time matching AMD across most of the market, but however fast Ryzen gets, Intel manages to make a chip that can, right at the limit, be faster. For many, that’s all the reason they need. Reaching 5.3GHz is probably pushing the design about as far as it can go, requiring trickery with boosts and quite probably liberties with binning and cooling. Intel will probably still make the fastest gaming chip, but it’s on the back foot on just about every other metric. Intel’s chip generations are clearly marketing fluff—this Comet Lake range looks suspiciously like a slightly overclocked set of ninth-gen chips. It’s better than nothing, though, and that 5.3GHz figure will grab the headlines.

5.3GHz is probably pushing the design as far as it can go.