Intel's Line of Notebook CPUs Gets More Confusing With 14nm Comet Lake

Intel today launched a new series of 14nm notebook CPUs code-named Comet Lake. Going by Intel's numbers, Comet Lake looks like a competent upgrade to its predecessor Whiskey Lake. The interesting question -- and one largely left unanswered by Intel -- is why the company has decided to launch a new line of 14nm notebook CPUs less than a month after launching Ice Lake, its first 10nm notebook CPUs. From a report: Both the Comet Lake and Ice Lake notebook CPU lines this month consist of a full range of i3, i5, and i7 mobile CPUs in both high-power (U-series) and low-power (Y-series) variants. This adds up to a total of 19 Intel notebook CPU models released in August, and we expect to see a lot of follow-on confusion. During the briefing call, Intel executives did not want to respond to questions about differentiation between the Comet Lake and Ice Lake lines based on either performance or price, but the technical specs lead us to believe that Ice Lake is likely the far more attractive product line for most users.

Intel's U-series CPUs for both Comet Lake and Ice Lake operate at a nominal 15W TDP. Both lines also support a "Config Up" 25W TDP, which can be enabled by OEMs who choose to provide the cooling and battery resources necessary to support it. Things get more interesting for the lower-powered Y-series -- Ice Lake offers 9W/12W configurable TDP, but Comet Lake undercuts that to 7W/9W. This is already a significant drop in power budget, which Comet Lake takes even further by offering a new Config Down TDP, which is either 4.5W or 5.5W, depending on which model you're looking at. Comet Lake's biggest and meanest i7, the i7-10710U, sports 6 cores and 12 threads at a slightly higher boost clock rate than Ice Lake's 4C/8T i7-1068G7. However, the Comet Lake parts are still using the older UHD graphics chipset -- they don't get access to Ice Lake's shiny new Iris+, which offers up to triple the onboard graphics performance. This sharply limits the appeal of the Comet Lake i7 CPUs in any OEM design that doesn't include a separate Nvidia or Radeon GPU -- which would in turn bump the real-world power consumption and heat generation of such a system significantly.