AMD's new Ryzen 3000 CPUs have made Intel chips all but redundant unless all you do is play a particular set of games which benefit most from Intel's higher clock speeds. But as we've seen in decades past, Intel tends to come back strong from a beating and so it may in 2020 when it's new Comet Lake CPUs are expected to debut. Leaked information gives us our first hint of what the new-generation of chips will be capable of, with the top of the line mainstream model offering 10 cores and a clock speed up to 5.2GHz.
AMD's new Ryzen 3000 CPUs currently top out at a 12-core, 24-thread monster in the form of the 3900X. It hits up to 4.6GHz on single core tasks and can comfortably sit at 4.1GHz for sustained loads on all cores. That's a lot lower than Intel's 5GHz+ 9900K, but it's much more consistent and with a higher instructions per clock, can go blow for blow against Intel's best without difficulty. Intel will need to come back hard to combat it and the current plan seems to be to leverage its aged 14nm process one more time for Comet Lake.
The 10900KF flagship will reportedly cost $500 and will have 10 cores and 20 threads. It will have 20MB of total cache, a TDP of 105w, and will max out at 5.2GHz on a single core. When all cores are engaged it will top out at 4.6GHz.
We'd also expect some more hardware mititigations for Spectre and its various exploit variants, which should help alleviate some of the problems Intel has had with software gimping performance on its chips.
Elsewhere in the range, Intel will reportedly keep six-cores as the mainstream i5 Offering, with clock speeds up to 4.9GHz, and eight-cores exclusively in the i7 segment, with clock speeds up to 5.1GHz. It will also bring back hyperthreading on the i7 chips, according to WCCFTech.
Expect these chips to arrive sometime in the third quarter 2020. Just in time for AMD's Ryzen 4000 chips to up the game again.
