Review of Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10600K CPUs: an iterative update pushing performance to new heights at the expense of power efficiency
This review lands three weeks after Intel's April 2020 launch of the 10th-gen desktop lineup, where the $488 Core i9-10900K brought 10 cores and 5.3GHz boost clocks to a part still built on the Skylake architecture. The verdict here is that the gains are real but bought entirely with power headroom rather than any architectural change.
That trade-off defines the arc that follows in this coverage: Intel iterated Skylake-derived silicon for years before the Alder Lake i9-12900K redesign added efficiency cores and DDR5 in 2021, and even then the follow-on Raptor Lake and 14th-gen reviews kept reporting higher power draw for only marginal performance movement.
First-order effects
Buyers shopping flagship desktop CPUs in mid-2020 get more multi-threaded performance from the i9-10900K than any prior mainstream Intel chip, but must accept worse efficiency than the parts it replaces.
Intel ships its third straight generation on essentially the same core design, leaving AMD's Ryzen stack holding the architectural-refresh advantage at the top of the desktop market.
Second-order effects
The efficiency gap pressures Intel into abandoning pure iteration, which materializes a year later as the heterogeneous Alder Lake design mixing performance and efficiency cores alongside DDR5 support.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, per-generation CPU competition shifts from raw clock-speed records toward performance-per-watt, a lens under which later reviews of the 13900K and 14900K judge successive Intel flagships harshly despite strong absolute numbers.
Sustained power-drawn scaling also raises cooling and platform costs for system builders, nudging high-end desktop buying decisions toward whatever competitor can deliver performance without escalating thermal budgets.
The trend: Intel's long tail of Skylake-based desktop iterations shows a vendor trading power efficiency for generational performance until an architectural reset becomes unavoidable.
The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10600K CPU Review: Skylake We Go Again https://www.anandtech.com/... // @anandtech does an exhaustive review of Intel's incremental upgrade “squeezing out” from the old platform. Read for just this impressive chart of the 32 vari…
Every 75yrs, we get a visit from Halley's Comet. If you can't wait until 2061, then @intel has launched it's new Comet Lake 10th Gen Core desktop processors. @IanCutress benched the Core i9-10900K, Core i7-10700K, and Core i5-10600K over a range of tests. https://www.anandtech.co…
@IanCutress @Techmeme So, everyone is now ok w/ OCed CPUs against stock? Turbo as a push on TDP vs ‘ST clocks for given TDP’ is nonsense and setting Tau to infinite is even worse. I like that you keep RAM at spec. Isnt mem OC only allowed on Z chipsets?
@IanCutress @Techmeme So are we basically done ever seeing any more significant single threaded performance improvements? So much of the software I use is single threaded :-/. Even the stuff that isnt has pretty dimenishing returns beyond ~8 threads
Finally got a chance to sit down a read a few Intel 10 series processor reviews. 2 things really stick out. Power draw on the 10900K is seriously in the FX-9590 range. The R5 3600X is still a super buy compared to the 10600K. Better perf, power, and $60 less (usually).
@evrsr @Techmeme Overclocking voids warranty. Having a different PL2/Tau to Intel's *suggested values* does not void warranty. Intel does not consider different PL2/Tau overclocking. Note it's been this way for a decade. MBs vendors have used non-standard PL2/Tau since Sandy
@Techmeme For what it's worth, we've only had Intel's press kit for five days. Haven't had a chance to go into overclocking performance yet, but we put all our new benchmark tests in, as well as our new power wrapper and also SPEC2006/2017 1T.