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3DMark confirmed Intel Comet Lake specs, but will it be enough to rival AMD Ryzen?

The imminent Intel Comet Lake generation all get HyperThreading, bringing them in line with their Ryzen rivals

Intel Comet Lake S

More confirmation has appeared online that with Intel Comet Lake CPUs it’s going to stop using HyperThreading as a way to differentiate between the chips in its product stack – the Intel Core i5 10600 will come with six cores and the full HyperThreaded 12 threads of processing chops. Given the AMD Ryzen competition it makes absolute sense for Intel to rethink its mainstream CPU strategy in this way, but will it be enough?

The new Core i5 10600 will form part of the phalanx of Intel Comet Lake processors set to hit the market, likely early in 2020. The fact that we’re now seeing Comet Lake benchmarks appear online with full CPU naming in place indicates that we’re really not far off from a full release. Up to now we’ve had to put up with ‘Genuine Intel (R) CPU” or “Intel 0000” as placeholders in the leaked benchmarks.

The latest of which have shown HP Pavilion all-in-one PCs rocking both this six-core, 12-thread chip as well as the top-end 10-core, 20-thread Comet Lake chips in engineering sample form. But this is the first to seemingly be operating with final silicon and not an early non-release chip.

The Intel Core i5 10600 result was originally posted on r/intel (via momomo_us) and has since been removed from the database, even the tweet has mysteriously vanished too. But before the images of the 3DMark result had been expunged from record, and we could find confirmation the six-core, 12-thread Comet Lake i5 will tip up with a base clock of 3.3GHz and a Turbo of 4.7GHz.

Throw in the benefits of HyperThreading and Intel will have a mainstream CPU capable of matching AMD’s Ryzen 5 range of chips in our list of the best CPUs for gaming. It actually seems funny to be writing that sentence when for so long the roles have been reversed. But such has been the impact of successive, successful Ryzen CPU generations that Intel has been prodded into action by AMD, and the roll out of HyperThreading across the processor spectrum is testament to that.

The chip was also tested in a new Z490 board, because after all, the Comet Lake chips are going to need a whole new socket and that means no backwards compatibility and a whole bunch of new motherboards.

Which means that AMD is still going to have things mostly its own way. The Z490 boards will likely be high-priced mobos, and that means even if the Core i5 10600 is priced around the same $190 as the brilliant AMD Ryzen 5 3600 the overall platform costs will far outstrip the red team’s mainstream marvel.