AMD’s Ryzen 4000 “Renoir” APU launch was without a doubt the core attraction at CES 2020 for the mainstream consumer. A monolithic design leveraging up to eight 7nm Zen 2 cores paired with a beefed-up Vega GPU is going to be leagues ahead of the older Picasso chips. The Zen 2 cores are already on par with Intel’s 14nm Skylake core in terms of IPC and gaming performance. The only remaining deficit is in terms of the boost clocks which will be nominal in mobile devices. Furthermore, unlike the desktop space, the GPUs will be the bottleneck in 99% of the cases, so AMD’s offerings are on par with Intel’s now in the mobile gaming segment as well. Intel isn’t sitting idle and is going with the tried and tested strategy of “Add more cores and overclock them as much as possible, and hope it works”.

As you can, it appears that Intel has bumped the Core count up to six cores from four to combat AMD’s new Renoir lineup. 3DMark still reports the thread count as eight which means that this is probably a recent, last-minute decision. The present 9th Gen H series consists of a quad-core hyperthreaded i5, the 9300H but in gaming, logical cores are mostly useless, so it’d make sense that Intel adds a couple more. From what we’ve already seen, there’s already going to be a quad-core i5-10300H for budget laptops, while the hex-core 10500H will complement the Core i7-10750H (also a hex-core part with HT) in the high-end space. The 10500H should be similar to the desktop-grade Core i5-9600K, albeit with lower clocks and a reduced power envelope. We’ll keep you posted as we hear more.