Intel Core i3-10100 Comet Lake-S Quad-Core Budget Desktop Chip Leaks
Today, we're getting detailed information on one new member of the Comet Lake-S family: the Core i3-10100. As its Core i3 designation confirms, this is an entry-level processor, albeit one with 4 cores and HyperThreading enabled (8 threads). According to a SiSoftware database entry originally uncovered by TUM_APISAK, the Core i3-10100 has a base clock of 3.6GHz, a total of 6MB L3 cache, and 1MB L2 cache.
It should be noted that Comet Lake-S processors, despite their 10th generation designation, are still based on Intel's tried and true 14nm++ process technology. The company is still not quite ready to shift its desktop family over to 10nm, and has only introduced a limited number of 10nm Ice Lake processor for the laptop market.
In addition, Comet Lake-S also appears to be somewhat of a stopgap product, as it is expected to require an LGA 1200 socket and a 400-Series chipset, meaning they will require new motherboards. Despite this need to change platforms, Comet Lake-S still won't support PCIe 4.0 which is now proliferating with AMD's Ryzen 3000 processors and their complementing X570-based motherboards. Granted, the only hardware that can take advantage of PCIe 4.0 at this time are AMD's Radeon RX 5700 Navi graphics cards and a handful of blazing fast SSDs.
As for the Core i3-10100, it's likely that Intel will position this processor up against low-end, third-generation AMD Zen 2 processors like the recently announced Ryzen 5 3500X. That processor is clocked at 3.6GHz/4.1GHz (base/boost) and features 6 physical cores, albeit without SMT support.
