A new leak suggests that Intel’s upcoming Comet Lake CPUs are going to be power-hungry beasts that require impressive cooling solutions to match. In particular, the peak performance of the CPU is reportedly expected to require a staggering 224 W, which equates to a TDP higher than the titan NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 GPU.
This news aligns nicely with previous reports that Intel was struggling to keep the power requirements of the flagship Core i9-10900-series chips down, which has led to a delay in announcing the 10th-gen CPUs. Z490 chipset-fitted motherboards are reportedly ready to go with motherboard manufacturers primed to hit the go button once they receive word from Intel that they’ve successfully tamed the chips gargantuan power needs.
The new leak now suggests that Intel may merely be accepting that the 10th-Gen Core i9-10900-series CPUs are power-hungry and going with the flow. The latest murmurs on the grapevine pinpoint the end of this month for an announcement, with a launch date sometime in May.
The leak in question shows very high PL1 and PL2 ratings for the ten-core Core i9-10900F. PL1 stands at 170 W and relates to power requirements under long-term loads, while the PL2 rating of 224 W points to Turbo mode short-term power boosts. These numbers effectively mean the Core i9-10900F should have a TDP rating of 170 W. The PL2 rating in the leak also interestingly only equates to a clock speed of 4.58 GHz.
As for a reason behind this huge power draw, the 14nm process is probably to blame. The architecture is far from new, dating back to 2015, and is struggling to cater for the extra cores found in the Comet Lake CPUs.
The bottom line for would-be users of the new 10th-gen Comet Lake CPUs is that we’ll need a big old PSU to keep things ticking over and a serious cooling solution to match.