Intel's notebook processor family gets even more confused with the 14 nm Comet Lake

Today, Intel launches a new series of 14-nm notebook processors codenamed Comet Lake. According to Intel figures, Comet Lake looks like a competent upgrade from its predecessor, Whiskey Lake. The interesting – and largely unanswered – question from Intel is why the company decided to launch a new range of 14nm notebook processors within a month of launching Ice Lake, its first processors for 10nm laptops.

This month's Comet Lake and Ice Lake PC processor lines include a full range of i3, i5 and i7 mobile processors in high power (U Series) and low power (Y Series) variants. This represents a total of 19 models of Intel notebook processors released in August, and we expect a lot of confusion. At the information meeting, the Intel executives did not want to answer the questions regarding the differentiation between the Comet Lake and Ice Lake lines, whether they are based on performance or price, but the technical specifications suggest that Ice Lake is probably the most appealing product line. for most users.

The Intel U Series processors for Comet Lake and Ice Lake operate at a nominal 15W TDP. Both lines also support a 25 W "Config Up" TDP, which can be enabled by OEMs who choose to provide the cooling and battery resources needed to support it.

Things get more interesting for the less powerful Y Series – Ice Lake offers a configurable TDP of 9W / 12W, but Comet Lake goes to 7W / 9W. This is already a significant drop in the power budget, Comet Lake goes even further by proposing a new configuration Down TDP, either 4.5W or 5.5W, depending on the model you are looking at.

The largest and most naughty i7 of Comet Lake, the i7-10710U, is composed of 6 cores and 12 wires with a clock frequency slightly higher than the 4C / 8T i7-1068G7 of Ice Lake . However, the Lake Comet parties still use the old UHD graphics chipset. They do not have access to the all new Iris + Ice Lake, which offers up to three times more integrated graphics performance. This significantly limits the appeal of Comet Lake i7 processors in any OEM that does not include a separate Nvidia or Radeon GPU, which would significantly reduce the power consumption and heat output of such a system.

The Comet Lake Y Series makes a similar compromise. Although the Comet Lake Y Series consumes far less energy than Ice Lake, it makes a lot of sacrifices to achieve this. Its all-core turbo frequencies are typically about 400 MHz lower than those of Ice Lake, the RAM goes from LPDDR4x-3733 to LPDDR3-2133 and (of course) without Iris + graphics. We expect all this to translate into a much better performance of the Ice Lake Y Series over the Comet Lake Y, at a very obvious level, in similarly configured systems.

Finally, Comet Lake does not support Intel's Deep Learning Boost, a set of extended and limited instructions that speeds up the workloads of AI based on vector neural networks. This extensive set of instructions was originally available in the Scalable processors of the Cascade Lake Xeon series before moving to the laptop with Ice Lake.

We are willing to give a pass to Comet Lake for this one. Personal Assistant technology in a moderate-to-near future may begin to take advantage of INT8 instructions, but for now, we do not think most consumers are likely to miss it.

One of the common goals of the two product lines is an enthusiasm for integrated support Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6. It's probably because neither one nor the other does part of the current lineup of rival AMD. Support for Wi-Fi 6 is particularly challenging, with a slide dedicated to Netgear, TP-Link, and Comcast's complimentary claims.

It's probably a mistake to be too excited about Wi-Fi support 6; the independent tests of the current harvest of Wi-Fi 6 routers do not support the generic claims of improvements of 300% of the bit rate and latency brought on this slide. More importantly, the true promise of Wi-Fi 6 was never a single-device charge. The real promise of Wi-Fi 6 lies in increasing the efficiency of the entire network. OFDMA, described by Netgear itself as the main benefit of Wi-Fi 6. Still according to Netgear, the benefits come true only when you have at least four Wi-Fi 6 clients running simultaneously.

conclusions

In a world that went directly from Whiskey Lake to Comet Lake, this range would look good. But we have a hard time seeing real value for Comet Lake in a market where Ice Lake has just been released. The low power consumption of the Comet Lake Y Series is interesting, but the 6C / 12T i7-0710U is the only truly tempting element in its U-series. In both cases, we expect most consumers to be better served with Ice Lake's much better graphics and RAM.

This is not the first time that Intel has abandoned a confusing mix of notebook processors on the market almost simultaneously. Some new eighth generation Coffee Lake products, for example, were launched after the completion of all of the ninth generation Coffee Lake and Whiskey Lake. It is tempting to assume that Intel needs this latest 14 nm update from Comet Lake because of production limits on Ice Lake, but it is just as likely that it will work. simply a usual activity in the world of Intel.

Assuming similar prices, we consider the Ice Lake product line to be significantly higher than Comet Lake for most consumers. The confusion between the two lines could also represent an area that Intel has let mature for its rival AMD to sweep. Maybe AMD will even finish the hat trick that he had started with Ryzen 3000 on the desktop and Epyc Rome in the server room.