Intel's future processor lineup has been in limbo for some time now. Thankfully, if leaked information is to be believed, there could be some interesting announcements from Intel at CES.

Weibo user MebiuW posted what appears to be an internal Intel document showing performance information on the unannounced Core i9-10900K processor: compared to the 9900K, the Comet Lake CPU has a 125W TDP (vs. 95W) and 10 cores (vs. 8 ), and the number of cores appears to be 10 (vs. 8). Depending on price and performance, it may soon be among the best CPUs for gaming.

Not surprisingly, the performance graphs use data from benchmarks commonly employed by Intel - SYSmark, SPEC, XPRT, etc. The most significant improvement over the 9900K is in the SPEC benchmark, where a 30% improvement is reported. Cinebench R15 follows close behind, reporting a 26% performance increase.

Interestingly, the XPRT results for the 10900K averaged only about 3 to 4 percent better than the same test for the 9900K; since XPRT measures single-threaded performance, Intel appears to have slightly increased the core clock compared to the 9900K. It appears that Intel's 14nm lithography still has some mileage left in it.

We expect additional details on Intel's upcoming Comet Lake processors at CES 2020 next week: in addition to two additional CPU cores compared to Coffee Lake (10 cores/20 threads instead of 8 cores/16 threads), Comet Lake is expected to require a new 400 series chipset and motherboard.

Based on these rumors, Intel and AMD appear to be in about the same position heading into 2020. Intel will continue to lead in single-core performance, while AMD will continue to focus on multi-threaded workloads.

Thanks, Tom's Hardware.