Spanish news outlet El Chapuzas Informatico claims that Intel will announce the company’s highly-anticipated 10th Generation Comet Lake desktop processors on April 30. However, benchmark and review embargoes reportedly won’t lift until the second week of May. Approach the rumored dates with a bit of caution since we have no way to confirm them.

As we know from a string of test submissions to public databases, Comet Lake desktop chips will span up to 10 cores. This is certainly a first for Intel, but much of the chipmaker’s shine will be overshadowed by AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X that offes up to 16 cores on a mainstream platform. That’s not to mention that AMD has already transitioned to the 7nm node with its Ryzen 3000-series (codename Matisse) chips while Comet Lake is still on Intel’s old 14nm process node.

The upcoming Comet Lake chips will not only have to face the stiff competition from AMD, but they’ll have an even harder time convincing consumers of their worth. Preliminary tray pricing shows that Comet Lake parts could be up to 12% more expensive in comparison to the previous Coffee Lake chips. This was to expected since Intel wouldn’t just give away more cores for free. 

The premium on the additional cores is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Due to the power requirements, Comet Lake commands a new motherboard that will be built around Intel’s fresh LGA1200 socket and corresponding 400-series chipsets. Although we’ve questioned Intel’s decision in the past, this generation of processors might justify the motherboard upgrade. 

Early rumors from January suggest that flagship 10-core Comet Lake processor could pull up to 300W of peak power. The claims are credible as we’ve learned that the PL2 (Power Level 2)  for that SKU is 250W. Months later, T-series chips, such as the Core i5-10500T and Core i7-10700T popped up in the SiSoftware database with peak power consumptions of 92W and 123W, respectively. These samples are unreleased silicon, so we should take the specifications with a bit of salt.

If El Chapuzas Informatico’s information is legit, we won’t have to wait long for the answers to all our Comet Lake questions.