Intel's New Core i5-110 Revives 5-Year-Old 14nm Comet Lake Architecture

Did you hear about intel's latest CPU? No, not the Arrow Lake refresh -- that's not out yet. It's the Core i5-110. That's right: the brand-new Intel Core i5-110 is in fact an LGA 1200 Comet Lake processor from 2020 that has been re-branded and re-launched for reasons only Intel knows.

We've basically told you the story, but let's go over the facts. The Core i5-110 is a 6-core / 12-thread processor based on Intel's decade-old Skylake architecture that has a base frequency of 2.9GHz and a boost frequency of 4.3GHz. It has 12MB of L3 cache, a 65W TDP, and supports two 64-bit channels of DDR4 memory at 2666MT/s. It includes Intel UHD Graphics 630 at up to 1.1GHz, and it supports 16 lanes of PCI Express 3.0.


If all those specifications sound awfully familiar, it's because this is exactly the same processor as the Core i5-10400 that launched back in Q3 of 2020. In all respects, in all configurations, it is exactly the same CPU—right down to the Recommended Customer Price of $200 USD—a really steep price considering the original chips seem to go for about $40 on eBay:


We glibly remarked on it above, but the model name deserves some special mention, too. "Core i5-110" doesn't fit neatly into either the classical 10th-gen Core naming scheme—it would have been "Core i5-10xxx"—nor into the Core processors (Series 1) family that it's listed under on Intel's website, which are normally named like "Core 7 Processor 150HL"—no "i".

It's that odd quirk that makes us think this may possibly be some kind of error, like someone miskeyed something or used the wrong document as a basis. It's not entirely unthinkable that Intel is shipping new 10th-gen processors for a specific purpose, though. Exactly what that purpose is though, is anyone's guess.

_{Thanks to 188号 for pointing out this CPU.}