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Play 14nm again, Sam, and again, and again

AMD's 4000-Series "Renoir" Ryzen Mobile chips arrived last week to critical acclaim, notching an impressive step forward for AMD's notebook ambitions as it takes the process node leadership position against Intel in laptops for the first time in history, but Intel isn't sitting still – its retort comes in the form of the H-Series Comet Lake chips for high-performance gaming and creativity-focused laptops.

Intel's new lineup pushes clock rates up to a maximum of 5.3 GHz, a new peak for laptops, and the company also brings its Core i7 lineup that comprises the bulk of its sales volume up to a peak of eight cores and 5.1 GHz for the first time. That's a notable clock speed advantage over AMD's Ryzen lineup, but unlike AMD's chips that come with a denser 7nm process and a new architecture, Intel's new lineup isn't really all that new: The chips are an iterative update of the previous-gen Coffee Lake processors and come with yet another flavor of the highly-refined 14nm process, so they still span from four to eight cores and fit within a 45W TDP.

Intel positions its chips as the leaders for desktop gaming, which often relies upon high clock speeds, but the company's peak 5.0 GHz (and beyond) clock speeds come in the form of its Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) technology that requires the processor to operate in optimal temperature ranges (below 50C), so performance will obviously vary based on the laptop's cooling capabilities. That means you'll likely only see those peaks in thicker and heavier laptops.

In either case, Intel touts that it has 30 thin-and-light gaming designs (sub-20mm thickness) coming to market, and over 100 other new laptop designs on the way. The company also recently touted that it has 70+ Project Athena laptops in the works, so it will obviously rely upon tight integration to wring out extra performance from other platform-level advantages, like Wi-Fi 6, AX201 Gig+, and Thunderbolt 3 connections.

Intel bumped up the peak dual-core clock speeds to 5.3 GHz for the flagship Core i9-10980HK, a nice 300 MHz increase, but as mentioned, this is only under optimal thermal and electrical conditions and likely won't last for any extended period of time. Intel says the standard Turbo Boost 3.0 / 2.0 frequencies are 200 MHz less than listed, and you'll see those more often during normal use. Intel also divulged that the -10980HK offers an all-core boost of 4.4 GHz and several of the chips have a configurable TDP that peaks at 65W. Peak power (PL2) weighs in at 135W.

Intel also brought its Core i7 lineup to a maximum of eight cores and sixteen threads with the -10875H, and while the company hasn't shared pricing, we expect this to come with a similar price tag to the previous-gen six-core model. Intel also brought clocks speeds up to a peak 5.1 GHz for its Core i7 lineup, and given that the i7 range comprises the bulk of sales, the company expects more than 60% of its new lineup to ship with 5.0 GHz (or beyond) capabilities.

Aside from those changes, the bulk of the improvements lies in the incremental clock speed improvements across the stack. Intel also improved memory from dual-channel DDR4-2666 to DDR4-2933 (up to 128GB) and maintained Optane memory support.

As before, the HK model is overclockable, while the Core i7-10850H is partially overclockable (a limit of 400 extra MHz). Intel also touts its new Adaptix Tuning Technology that is an automated overclocking software similar to its one-click Intel Performance Maximizer software for desktop chips. This software automatically dials in the best possible overclock based on the power and thermal capabilities of the laptop.
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