MAY 2020 PCWorld 15on single threads, where clock
speed rules the roost? Or
follow AMD, which has made
its strongest case in decades
that its Ryzen 9 4900HS is
simply the highest-performing
mobile PC processor (go.
pcworld.com/49hs) on the
market?
It sounds like we’ll have a
number of points of
comparison, as Intel’s
promising that more than 100
different systems, largely
aimed at gamers and content creators, will
include the new H-series chips. Preorders for
those PCs began April 2, with systems starting
to ship on April 15.
INTEL’S COMET LAKE-H
PUSHES WELL ABOVE 5GHZ
Comet Lake-H isn’t Intel’s first mobile gaming
chip, but it’s the first to appear in such a wide
swath of laptops, including thin-and-lights.
Intel didn’t even make a 9th-gen Core chip for
thin-and-light PCs, so the prior Intel Core
i9-9980HK and its cousins (go.pcworld.
com/99hk) ended up being stuffed into
4-pound notebooks like the Asus ZenBook
Pro, Dell Precision 15, or the Apple MacBook
Pro 15.
In contrast, Intel expects more than 30
systems using Comet Lake-H will be thin-and-
light designs slimmer than 20mm. Intel
executives said that Comet Lake-H will be
featured in designs across the consumer,
commercial, and workstation markets, with
innovations including 300Hz displays and
HDR1000 panels.
Every chip in Intel’s new Comet Lake-H
lineup consumes 45W, which makes them far
more powerful and power-hungry than Intel’s
well-received 28W Ice Lake chips (go.
pcworld.com/inil) introduced last year.
(AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series are 35W chips.)
One question is why Intel built a Comet
Lake-H chip, rather than design a more
powerful version of the well-rounded Ice Lake
chip. The idea, according to Frederik
Hamberger, Intel’s general manager of
premium and gaming laptops, was to design
Comet Lake-H specifically for gamers and
content creators, each of which typically
prefer a discrete GPU. As such, the CometExpect that Intel’s new Comet Lake-H chips will go into notebooks
like (but not necessarily including) this Asus ROG Zephyrus GX501.