Kishalaya Kundu
Having announced its Comet Lake laptop CPUs late last year, Intel on Thursday unveiled its 10th-generation Core processor lineup for desktop computers. There are 32 new processors in the lineup, starting with Celeron and Pentium Gold at the entry-level and going right up to Core i9 chips at the top-end. Based on the ‘Skylake’ microarchitecture and built on Intel’s 14++nm process, the chips go up to 10 cores and offer single-core turbo speeds of up to 5.3 GHz.
The top dog in the lineup is the deca-core Core i9-10900K which offers a boost speed of 5.3GHz. It comes with a TDP of 125 watts, but has a turbo power recommendation of 250W. It’s been priced at $488. At the entry-level segment, there’s the dual-core Celeron G5900 and G5900T. Both of them cost $42 a pop, but while the former has a base frequency of 3.4GHz and a 58W TDP, the latter is clocked at 3.2GHz and is rated at 35W.
The Pentiums and Celerons are all dual core parts, but while the Pentium chips are hyper-threaded (2-core, 4-threads), the Celerons (2-cores, 2-threads) miss out on that feature. All the Core i3, i5, i7 and i9 chips are also hyper-threaded. The i3 chips are quad-core parts with eight threads, the Core i5 processors are hexa-core parts with twelve threads, while the Core i7 processors are octa-core parts with sixteen threads.
Certain models, like the Core i9-10900, come with unlocked ‘K’ variants, while some also have additional ‘F’ versions without integrated graphics and slightly lower price-tags. The Core i9 and i7 chips all support dual channel DDR4-2933 RAM, while the rest of the chips only support up to DDR4-2666. The unlocked ‘K’ CPUs will be available for purchase from this month, but there’s no immediate word on when the other chips will officially launched.