Intel’s 10th-gen Core i3 CPUs may be supercharged with hyper-threading to battle AMD

Intel recently cut prices with certain budget CPUs, and as it looks to strike back against AMD’s recent successes in the desktop processor market, it would appear the plan is to seriously pep up its incoming 10th-gen lower-end Core i3 chips.

At least this is the latest word from prolific leaker TUM_APISAK, who spotted a SiSoftware benchmark for the incoming Intel Core i3-10100.

As you can see above, the processor runs at 3.6GHz, but more importantly, it’s a quad-core, eight-thread model – at least if this leak is correct and the benchmark isn’t somehow fabricated.

Intel's Project Athena aims for more efficient laptops
These are the best of AMD's rival processors
There's a whole world of PC components out there

Intel’s 9th-gen Core i3 is a quad-core model with four-threads, so what we are (allegedly) seeing with the next-gen is the introduction of hyper-threading to Core i3.

Incidentally, the Core i3-9100 also runs at a base clock of 3.6GHz, but it’s possible the Core i3-10100 spotted in the benchmark is an early engineering sample, and it’ll likely be clocked a bit faster with the production chips.

Hyper-threading for all…

Given hyper-threading in Core i3, it seems an obvious assumption that it will be present throughout the full range of Intel’s next-gen Comet Lake processors (which are still on 14nm, of course, with yet another refinement of that process).

Previous speculation has pointed to quad-core eight-thread Core i3 models with Comet Lake, alongside Core i5 chips running with six-cores and 12-threads, Core i7 with eight-cores and 16-threads, and Core i9 topping off at 10-cores plus 20-threads (the latter being previously rumored as a Ryzen 9 3900X beater with single-core Turbo up to 5.2GHz).

With current 9th-generation chips, only the Core i9 processors have hyper-threading (meaning the rest of the range has the same number of threads as cores).

Hyper-threading is what Intel calls simultaneous multi-threading, meaning the actual physical cores of the CPU can be split into virtual ones – threads – which can really help with heavy duty multitasking and certain apps.

Comet Lake chips are expected to emerge in early 2020, although before that – in fact later this month – we will see the launch of the new Core i9-9900KS at the high-end of Intel’s current CPU line-up (a chip capable of reaching 5GHz across all eight cores).