Intel announces 10th-gen Comet Lake chips

Intel today announced its suite of 10th-generation chips that use the company’s new “Comet Lake” architecture.

The new 14nm chips, which arrive hot on the heels of the company’s new 10nm Ice Lake range, include Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 models with up to six cores and maximum clock speeds of up to 4.9GHz. This is, notably, the first time an Intel U-Series chip has ever included as many as six cores.

The “Comet Lake” lineup will initially comprise four U-Series and four Y-Series parts, the former offering a higher level of performance, and the latter targeted at higher efficiency tablets and laptops, especially fanless designs.

Intel claims the new chips will deliver 16% better overall performance compared with previous-generation chips. They have support for faster memory, too, and perhaps most interestingly the supporting Intel 400 Series Chipset will also have integrated support for the new Wi-Fi 6 standard.

“Our 10th Gen Intel Core mobile processors provide customers with the industry-leading range of products that deliver the best balance of performance, features, power and design for their specific needs,” said Chris Walker, Intel’s corporate vice president and general manager of Mobility Client Platforms in the Client Computing Group.

“From multitasking to everyday content creation, the newest additions to the family scale performance for even higher levels of productivity – in addition to offering best-in-class platform connectivity via Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3 that people expect with 10th-Gen.”

The announcement of Comet Lake CPUs closely follows the unveiling of Intel’s first suite of 10nm processors. Its tenth-generation Ice Lake series of processors comprise 11 models and, while these are broken up into the normal laptop U- and Y-series just like Comet Lake, Intel has tweaked the nomenclature so that you can determine the graphics performance of a chip at a glance.

With the Core i7-1065G7, for instance, which is the top Ice Lake processor, the 65 denotes the position of the chip in the CPU family and thus hints at its performance. Meanwhile, the G7 at the end indicates that the processor comes with the most powerful variant of Intel’s Gen11 Iris Plus graphics.

And graphics are important here, because alongside the CPU performance and efficiency hike Ice Lake brings, Intel claims those new chips will be able to handle all manner of tasks with aplomb, including some gaming on the go.

You’d be forgiven for shaking your head at this point, as Intel certainly hasn’t made it easy to figure out what CPU is best you if you’re after a new laptop come the end of 2019. But we’re likely to get a better impression of what both families of mobile chips can do once laptops start to arrive with them.

The good news is that Intel also said that more than 90 mobile devices are set to arrive in time for Christmas with the new processors on board, so there’s likely to be plenty of choice for those keen to adopt the new technology.