Comet Lake Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/28...ut-on-14nm

It’s good to see the CPU market moving forward in terms of core counts, but we’ve seen core counts offered at a given price point jump dramatically in just the past two years thanks to AMD’s Ryzen processor. The market has definitely noticed — the number of CPUs with more than four cores has grown substantially in recent months according to the Steam Hardware Survey — but dual-core and quad-core chips still hold ~88 percent of the market. Rumors that the PS5 and Xbox Next will use Ryzen-derived 8-core chips could mean the next generation of games will lean more on CPU horsepower and respond better to higher thread counts, but strong multi-threaded adoption in games has played out slowly over years.

But diminishing returns are inevitable as core counts increase, particularly when they leap ahead quickly. This is not to say that a 10-core Comet Lake won’t deliver improvements over the Core i9-9900K, but that buyers of this still-hypothetical part will want to pay careful attention to where it does and does not improve overall performance. If this part is real, it also implies that Intel’s initial 10nm push will focus on mobile and low-power systems, similar to how the company rolled Broadwell and first-generation 14nm as a mobile solution first and foremost. While not impossible, it seems unlikely that Intel would launch a 10-core 14nm part on desktop next year, only to turn around and drop 10nm silicon in the same space.