Intel's new 10th Gen chips bring 5.0GHz clock speeds to gaming laptops - The Verge, The Verge

Intel is announcing the next wave of its Core processors, and it’s finally bringing out the big guns, with its first th Gen Comet Lake H-series processors for laptops. They’re Intel’s beefiest, most powerful, and most demanding chips, designed to go in high-end gaming laptops and creative machines for users who need the most power. The new chips have a TDP of W, with clock speeds that can boost past 5.0GHz, a first for Intel’s processors.

The star of the show is the new Core i9 model, the Core i9 – (K, with eight cores, 30 threads, and a base clock speed of 2.3GHz that can boost all the way up to 5.3 GHz. But Intel will be offering multiple chips that can reach maximum boost speeds of 5.0GHz or more between its i9 and i7 lineup (the two i5 chips max out at a paltry 4.6GHz and 4.5GHz). It’s a big leap forward, one that Intel promises should offer up to 65 percent better overall performance compared to a three-year-old laptop with a Core i7 – HK.

The i9 and i7 chips also have a new feature Intel calls “Thermal Velocity Boost,” which helps Intel reach those 5.0GHz-plus speeds by automatically boosting clock frequency by up to (MHz when the processor’s temperature measures) degrees Fahrenheit / degrees Celsius or lower (assuming there’s power available).

Intel th Gen H-series

Model Cores / Threads

Intel Core i9 – 01575879 HK

Intel Core i7 – H

Intel Core i7 – (H

Intel Core i5 – H

Intel Core i5 – (H

nm Ice Lake process

Watts
Boost / Base Frequency (GHz)
Watts
Boost / Base Frequency (GHz)
	8C / T	W		Up to 5.3 / 2.4 GHz
	8C / T	W	Up to 5.1 / 2.3 GHz
6C / T		W	Up to 5.1 / 2.7 GHz
6C / T		W		Up to 5.0 / 2.6 GHz
	4C / 8T		W	Up to 4.6 / 2.6 GHz
	4C / 8T		W		Up to 4.5 / 2.5 GHz	If you’ve been keeping track, Intel’s been releasing its (th Gen chips for months now in laptops, with both its) nm Comet Lake processors and its fancy new nm Ice Lake chips (which offer better battery life, performance, and efficiency thanks to the process improvements). But until now, all of its 14 th Gen chips have been either low-power Y-series chips designed for ultralights like the MacBook Air) or midrange U-series (think computers like the 17 – inch MacBook Pro). To be clear: these new chips are still Comet Lake chips built on Intel’s (nm process) similar to the Comet Lake Y-series and U-series chips Intel released last summer). They don’t use the

or its upcoming successor, the 12 nm Tiger Lake process

that Intel teased at CES.

That means that a lot of the benefits that come with the nm Ice Lake chips – including Intel’s integrated Gen Iris Plus graphics – aren’t coming to these new laptops. On the other hand, given that almost every H-series machine will have a discrete mobile GPU (like, say, Nvidia’s newly announced RTX Super lineup for laptops

, the slower integrated graphics isn’t that big of a loss.

And the older process actually might help benefit the new H-series chips, as Intel’s long development time and experience with the incrementally developed 21 nm node has helped it achieve better performance than it could at the nm level right now. Like Intel’s other

th Gen chips, the new H-series models will see some of the lineup-wide benefits, like integrated Wi-Fi 6 support and Thunderbolt 3. All the new H-series chips will also support Intel’s Optane memory.

The new chips are meant to be Intel’s answer to AMD’s highly anticipated Ryzen (series – specifically, AMD’s top-of-the-line) (W H-series chips, like the Ryzen 9) HS, Ryzen 7 (H, and Ryzen 5) H. While the first laptops with AMD’s new chips are just starting to roll out, early impressions of them

have been extremely positive

. Intel’s new chips look to raise the bar again compared to AMD’s top chips, offering faster clock speeds than AMD’s already impressive numbers. We’ll have to see how the new chips perform head to head – as well as how things like price, battery life, and laptop sizes compare – before we can see if Intel has defended its crown.

New laptops with the H-series chips should be available in the coming weeks, with manufacturers like (Asus) , (MSI) , Gigabyte , and more all debuting new or updated hardware alongside Intel’s announcement.

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