Intel has been having a hard time of it over the past couple of years, with AMD stealing all of the limelight, the mindshare, and the multi-threaded performance crowns. But that's mostly been a tale of the desktop. On mobile, in laptops big and small, Intel still dominates and with new competition from AMD's Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs coming very soon, Intel is hitting back hard with some truly monstrous mobile chips of its own.
Expanding its existing 10th-generation Comet Lake CPUs are a number of high-end "HK" model CPUs which show amazingly high frequencies in a mobile chip. The flagship Core i9-10980HK has eight cores, 16 threads, and can boost to over 5GHz on some cores. We're also told that the Core i7 CPUs will be able to hit 5GHz and that all chips will sport the rather unimpressive UHD 630 graphics.
This is exciting news for those who want to buy high-end laptops for gaming and or production work. A new-generation of MacBook Pros will no doubt offer the 10980HK as a high-tier option. But the question remains of how well these chips will operate in the wild. They might be capable of hitting such monstrous frequencies, but as we've seen with Intel's desktop chips, that will come at a price. And it's a high thermal one.
Intel might claim that its 10980HK is a 45w TDP CPU, but there's no way it will be able to maintain a 5GHz+ boost at that sort of thermal demand. It will need much more than that and that's only going to be possible in the heftiest of laptops with the most extreme of noisy cooling solutions.
We expect these CPUs to be strong performers, but they'll need some unique cooling profiles to truly be taken advantage of. Expect general usage to be much closer to the comparatively pedestrian 3.1GHz base clock.
Thanks WCCFTech.
