Intel’s new 10th Gen Comet lake desktop processors arrived, but are they enough to takeover AMD Ryzens, Let’s find out. Intel tried to cover the performance difference as much it can. Opened all its trump cards for maintaining a high frequency, lower temperatures, high core counts, and threads compared to previous-gen, still at 14 nm process node. Intel has some good engineering with them, squeezed out more with the aged 14 nm, I doubt if AMD could do that. Some good stuff but intel can’t ignore the science here, many limitations Intel faced due to old microarchitecture and 14nm. Temperature and power consumption could have been reduced, and IPC performance could have been elevated if Intel had used the new architecture and 10nm process.
However, the new 10th Gen processors have good temperatures despite having more cores and threads and excessive power consumption. Intel reduced the height of the processor die made it thinner, increased the width (width) of the IHS (integrated heat spreader) making it thicker, and adding modified STIM (solder thermal interface material) allowing the processor to transfer more heat to IHS and from IHS to cooler. I think Intel should have used this brain long ago. Overclocking is possible in “K” and “KF” processors but Not much headroom left for overclocking and need a good motherboard, good power supply, and good cooler to achieve good overclocking as well as high boost frequency. New LGA1200 socket motherboard is required to run the new CPUs, as of now Z490 Chipset motherboard is only available.
So Core i9-10900K is Intel’s first 10 core / 20 threads consumer processor which is the world’s fastest gaming chip. Talking more about Core i9, the boost frequency of Core i9 is 5.3 GHz with Intel thermal velocity boost technology, and using Turbo Boost 3.0 Max gives better frequency in 2 best cores. You can overclock the Core i9-10900K to 5.1, 5.2 GHz across all cores with a nice cooler. There is not much difference between the Core i9-10900K and the Core i9-10900K, “KF” does not have iGPU, everything else is the same. TDP value is 125W of both these CPUs and the peak power draw is more than 250W while Turbo Boost in some heavy workload.
Ryzen 9 3900x which has 12 cores/24 threads ahead in renderings, Encoding, 3D Modeling, and multi-threaded tasks, obviously, Ryzen gets 2 extra core and better IPC advantages. Intel favored tasks, where the Core i9-10900K is ahead in office work, Adobe Premiere Pro (Premiere Pro takes the integrated GPU advantage of the CPU), and Single-threaded workloads. When it comes to Gaming, performance is outstanding on Intel Core i9-10900K, and yes, Core i9-10900K is the “Worlds fastest gaming CPU”. Ryzen 9-3900X is slightly behind Intel in gaming and single or low threaded task but the multi-threaded workload place is secured by Ryzen 9-3900X and Ryzen 9-3950X is a king of all in this with 16 Core/32 Threads. Power consumption is quite good in Ryzen compared to Intel.
Core i7-10700K has 8 Core/16 Threads, is also a great choice for gaming and all other tasks. Basically it is a Core i9-9900K of the last generation with some turbo boost frequency tweaks. Core i7-10700K gives up to 5.1 GHz with Turbo Boost 3.0 Max and Intel Thermal Velocity Boost is missing in Core i7 line up. Typical Intel thing we see here categorizes features across chips, fortunately, hyperthreading is enabled in all parts. TDP value is 125W and overall power consumption is very decent near to TDP but the peak power draw is around 200W in some heavy workloads. Native memory support is DDR4 2933 MHz across core i9 to core i7. There is a Core i7-10700KF variant without iGPU, which costs less. Ryzen 7 3800X is a good competitor of Core i7-10700K, comes in the same 8 core/16 thread design, and at a much lower price with some performance compromises.
Conclusion
Intel still using the modified aging “Skylake” microarchitecture in the modified 14nm process. The good thing is Intel managed to optimize the overall chips to handle all the modern task very fluidly with high frequency but at the cost of high power consumption. Few things you keep in mind, No PCI-e 4.0 support, no higher MHz memory support (native is 2933 MHz). In gaming no doubt the Intel platform is again the best, gaming crown goes to Core i9-10900K even Core i7-10700K is also a good performer. Now, Ryzen 9 3900X will be a good choice, if gaming, streaming, and recording or casual gaming along with lots of productivity work is a priority. Ryzen supports PCI-express 4.0 and takes better advantage of high-frequency ram. In Short, Intel just closes the gap to AMD by increases cores, threads, and frequency as AMD offers high performance and high core count for productivity task.
