Hong Kong media XFastest has somehow got its hands on a couple of PowerPoint slides that purportedly provide a ton of confidential information on Intel's upcoming Comet Lake-S (CML-S) line of mainstream processors.

(Image credit: Intel)

Comet Lake-S is the codename for Intel's desktop processors that will eventually show up to replace the existing Coffee Lake Refresh (CFL-R) lineup. The new processors are very likely carved with an improved 14nm production process. Comet Lake-S chips will carry up to 10 cores, two more than the current flagship Intel Core i9-9900K part. It would seem that the extra cores come with a cost. If the leaked information is accurate, the flagship Comet Lake-S is rated with a 125W TDP (thermal design power), which is 30W higher than the Intel Core i9-9900K's 95W rating. As expected, Intel will continue to offer 65W and 35W Comet Lake-S parts as well.

(Image credit: XFastest)

The core upgrade on Comet Lake-S implicates steeper power requirements, and as a result, calls for fresh motherboards with stronger power delivery subsystems. This could be one of the main reasons why Intel is supposedly moving the upcoming 14nm chips to a new home. Therefore, Comet Lake-S processors will reportedly only fit into a motherboard with an LGA 1200 socket, 49 more pins than the existing LGA 1151 socket. As per usual, new motherboards give Intel the opportunity to introduce new chipset silicon, which in this case, is rumored to be the 400-series.

Microarchitecture Max Cores / Threads Max TDP Lithography PCIe 3.0 Socket Memory Support Launch Date Comet Lake* 10 / 20 125W 14nm 16 LGA 1200 Dual DDR4-2666 2020 Coffee Lake Refresh 8 / 16 95W 14nm 16 LGA 1151 Dual DDR4-2666 2018 Coffee Lake 6 / 12 95W 14nm 16 LGA 1151 Dual DDR4-2666 2017 Kaby Lake 4 / 8 91W 14nm 16 LGA 1151 Dual DDR4-2400 2016 Skylake 4 / 8 91W 14nm 16 LGA 1151 Dual DDR4-2133 2015

*Specifications in the table are unconfirmed

As far as other specifications go, Comet Lake-S might maintain compatibility for DDR4-2666 memory modules and have the same 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes as current Coffee Lake Refresh chips. From a platform standpoint, there is support for Wi-Fi 802.11ax, Bluetooth 5, Intel Optane memory, Thunderbolt 3 and up to 30 chipset I/O lanes to distribute among the SATA III, USB 3.1 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports.

(Image credit: ASCII)

A recent report from Japanese media ASCII, who covered ECS' Liva event, snapped a photograph of the roadmap for the Liva mini-PC. There is mention of the budget H410 and H470 and enterprise Q470 chipsets. We have no doubts that Intel will also release the high-end Z470 and Z490 chipsets for the forthcoming 10-core Comet Lake-S flagship processor.

The ECS roadmap seems to coincide with XFastest's leaked roadmap on the launch date for Comet Lake-S. We can expect Intel to start rolling out Comet Lake-S processors in the first quarter of 2020.

