Intel's 10th-generation processors, the Comet Lake-series of CPUs built on its long-in-the-tooth 14nm technology are now heading out for validation. With a potential 10 cores and a clock speed that boosts to 5.2GHz at the top end, these chips could offer serious competition for AMD's recent Ryzen 3000-series CPUs.
Intel may still maintain a slight edge in performance in games thanks to its CPUs' higher clock speeds than the AMD competition, but everywhere else it's fallen well behind. AMD's new processors offer more cores, more threads, better IPC, and much greater efficiency. So Intel needs to come back strong if it's to help recapture some of the mindshare it's lost to AMD in recent months.
The 10-series will be its attempt to do that, although the capabilities of a new generation remain under wraps for now. We would expect it to pull slightly further ahead in gaming capabilities, but even a 10-core chip is going to struggle to match AMD for efficiency and multi-threaded workloads when the AMD Ryzen 3950X, with 16-cores and built on a 7nm technology, is just around the corner.
We initially expected Intel's next-gen CPUs to debut in 2020, but with the new processors now heading out for validation according to an EEC rating (via PCGamesN), it seems like we might see these new desktop chips before the end of the year.
We won't see sub-14nm technology from Intel in the desktop space until at least 2020 though, and possibly even further into 2021/2022.
