Intel announces Comet Lake-H mobile processors

Intel has announced its latest 10th generation Core Comet Lake-H mobile processor, and it promises to be the fastest mobile chip out there right now. 

According to the firm, it will offer desktop-calibre performance on the move, with an eye on gamers and creators who need high-end systems. It should also offer some opportunities for those keen to overclock their processor. 

The series of mobile processors offer a variety of different speeds. At its most impressive is the 10th Gen Intel Core i9-10980HK which promises 2.4 GHz at base clock with a 5.3 GHz boost clock, along with a fully unlocked multiplier. Expect eight cores, 16 threads and 16MB of Intel Smart Cache here. How does that translate in reality? 

Comparing it to a three-year old system such as an Intel Core i7-7920HQ or i7-7820HK, Intel reckons it will mean up to 54 percent more frames per second while gaming, up to 44 percent better overall performance, and up to two times faster 4K video rendering. As always, all of these figures can be taken with a pinch of salt given everything will have been conducted in optimal conditions, and we're talking compared to a three year old system, these are still rather good figures. 

Alongside the i9-10980HK, there's the 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10750H processor with a base clock of 2.6 GHz ramping up to 5 GHz Turbo. It has six cores, 12 threads, and 12 MB L3 cache. Again, Intel reckons it'll achieve up to 44 percent more frames per second when gaming, with up to 33 percent better overall performance and up to 70 percent faster 4K video exporting. This chip is partially unlocked meaning it can be manually overclocked by up to four bins.

There's also the eight cores, 16 threads, i7-10875H which doesn't have an unlocked multiplier. It still clocks in at 2.3 GHz base with up to 5.1 GHz boost. 

Intel is keen to stress that these are ideal chips for thin-and-light systems, using this opportunity to point out how more than 30 such laptops will launch this year, all measuring 20mm or less in thickness. In conjunction, all will offer integrated Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 (Gig+) which aims to support nearly three times faster downloads via Wi-Fi, Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0, Intel Adaptix Dynamic Tuning Technology, and Thunderbolt 3. The latter being particularly useful for 4K enthusiasts given it makes it easy to connect two 4K displays to the relevant high-end laptop.

Amongst all that exciting talk, it's worth acknowledging that the Comet Lake-H series of chips only support conventional DDR4 SODIMM memory with native support for DDR4-2933. LPDDR3 support has been dropped with no support for LPDDR4 or LPDDR4x either. Still, the processors support up to 128GB of dual-channel memory.

Coupled with news of AMD's Ryzen Mobile 4000-series chips, expect to see some powerful gaming laptops over the coming few months.