Intel Tips 10th Generation 'Comet Lake' H Series Laptop CPUs, New NUC 9 Extreme, 'Tiger Lake' Details

In advance of its formal press conference on Monday of CES 2020, Intel teased a few details on its plans for upcoming laptop CPUs (both imminent and further down the road), and gave a glimpse of a powerful mini-PC platform it will be spearheading under the NUC umbrella.

Comet Lake-H Is Getting Close

For starters, the company acknowledged that the high-end mobile versions of its 10th Generation "Comet Lake" CPUs would be appearing "very soon," according to a spokesman at the Jan. 6 Intel Performance Session we attended. With 10th Generation "Comet Lake" and "Ice Lake" chips for ultraportables now on the market, it was a matter of time before the H Series models would show up.

The chip maker was cagey about much nitty-gritty, though. The basic stuff: The chips will run up to Core i9 versions, along the same lines as the Core i9-9980HK that tops the current "Coffee Lake" 9th Generation series. The Comet Lake-H chips will come in versions up to eight cores and 16 threads (with Hyper-Threading), with more of the chip SKUs coming in an 8C/16TH flavor than just the very top-end Core i9.

Under boost conditions, the Core i7 10th Gen H Series will peak at over 5GHz, with the Core i9 variants cresting even higher. Intel did not specify how many cores would be able to hit that boost clock, or under what conditions. Nor did it get into detail about the integrated graphics solution that might be on the chip (say, Iris Plus versus UHD Graphics).

Acer ConceptD Ezel7

Early designs with Comet Lake-H series CPUs that we have seen so far include the Lenovo Legion Y740s (see our hands on of that machine) and the Acer Concept D Ezel 7 and Ezel 7 Pro. (Pictured above; hands on forthcoming.) Neither OEM was able to share more detail about these CPUs.

The NUC Gets Bigger, More Muscular

Intel's venerable NUC platform is moving to a larger form factor with the NUC 9 Extreme, a gaming-oriented mini-PC that Intel teased as well. Code-named "Ghost Canyon," the new NUC succeeds the previous-most-powerful, the "Hades Canyon" NUC, which made use of a now-discontinued special Intel CPU/AMD graphics Core i7 chip that brought discrete graphics to the NUC platform for the first time.

Intel NUC 9 Extreme

Ghost Canyon is quite the different animal, with a 45-watt CPU that peaks at over 5GHz boost, with unlocked cores and the ability to host a discrete desktop video card (albeit a short one) inside its chassis. That is a first for a NUC, which have all previously relied on integrated Intel graphics (or the on-chip AMD solution of Hades Canyon).

Early details, again, were slim, with the Ghost Canyon NUC boasting a 5-liter design and a power supply actually built into the little chassis. The most intriguing tease, though, is that the new NUC will be based at the core on Intel's Compute Element technology, which will allow for easy future CPU upticks. (Check out our first look at the Compute Element from Computex 2019.) It is essentially a modular design for the core componentry.

'Tiger Lake' Gets Teased

Last, Intel acknowledged the rumored "Tiger Lake" platform, the mobile platform that will presumably succeed the 10nm "Ice Lake" as a refined 10nm process. Apart from some guidance on evaluating AI performance on client machines versus servers, the main takeaway from the Tiger Lake tease is that it will make use of Intel's upcoming Xe graphics and will deploy three AI "engines" to speed client AI performance. Intel noted that more detail would be forthcoming in the Monday conference. Stay tuned.

Intel Tiger Lake

About Our Expert

John Burek

Executive Editor and PC Labs Director

My Experience

I have been a technology journalist for almost 30 years and have covered just about every kind of computer gear—from the 386SX to 64-core processors—in my long tenure as an editor, a writer, and an advice columnist. For almost a quarter-century, I worked on the seminal, gigantic Computer Shopper magazine (and later, its digital counterpart), aka the phone book for PC buyers, and the nemesis of every postal delivery person. I was Computer Shopper's editor in chief for its final nine years, after which much of its digital content was folded into PCMag.com. I also served, briefly, as the editor in chief of the well-known hard-core tech site Tom's Hardware.

During that time, I've built and torn down enough desktop PCs to equip a city block's worth of internet cafes. Under race conditions, I've built PCs from bare-board to bootup in under 5 minutes. I never met a screwdriver I didn't like.

I was also a copy chief and a fact checker early in my career. (Editing and polishing technical content to make it palatable for consumer audiences is my forte.) I also worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

The Technology I Use

I use a lot of computers on rotation in my daily work, but I rely on just a few to get things done. I split my work life mostly between a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (a 15-inch Ryzen model), paired with a Lenovo ThinkVision portable monitor, and a custom-built big-chassis Windows 10 desktop PC that has served me well for years now. (Specs: Liquid-cooled Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition, 32GB of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1080 card.) That's all in a giant chassis with six hard drives and SSDs packing its bays. (As I upgrade systems, I just keep moving the old warhorse drives over.) This behemoth is hooked up to a 32-inch LG monitor.

I also have a bunch of PCs around the house, all custom builds: another one attached to my main TV (for gaming and occasional forays into VR), a mini-PC on the bedroom TV (acting as a media server), and a Mini-ITX desktop in a corner of the living room...just because. I carry around an oversize OnePlus phone, but when I do long-haul travel, a vintage iPod Touch comes along, too, for old times' sake.

I wasn't always a PC guy. I cut my teeth on a cassette-drive-equipped Commodore VIC-20 in the 1980s. But I got serious with Apple desktops in the early 1990s, starting with a Macintosh SE, then a Macintosh LC, and finally one of the short-lived Umax "clone" Macs, before building my first PC and never looking back.

With all my typing and editing work over the years, I've become a huge proponent of thumb trackballs, which minimize wrist action (and my wrist pain). I have a secret cache of the long-discontinued Microsoft Trackball Optical Mouse (my personal favorite), held in an undisclosed location.

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