LGA 1200: Intel’s Upcoming 14 Nm Comet Lake-S Desktop CPUs Will Require New Motherboards

[Tsing]

New slides leaked by XFastest confirm that Comet Lake-S CPUs (Intel's Coffee Lake Refresh successor) will be powered on the all-new LGA 1200 socket and 400-series chipset. This is reportedly due to the lineup's increased core counts (up to 10 cores/20 threads), which demand beefier components with improved power delivery.

Case in point: the top Comet Lake-S part is rated with a 125 W TDP, which is significantly higher than the Core i9-9900K's 95 W TDP. Critics aren't happy with the new motherboard requirement because these chips are yet another round of 14 nm parts.

As far as other specifications go, Comet Lake-S might maintain compatibility for DDR4-2666 memory modules and have the same 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes as current Coffee Lake Refresh chips. From a platform standpoint, there is support for Wi-Fi 802.11ax, Bluetooth 5, Intel Optane memory, Thunderbolt 3 and up to 30 chipset I/O lanes to distribute among the SATA III, USB 3.1 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports.

 

[SeymourGore]

Don't mind my ignorance if this is a stupid question, but have all of those hardware security issues been patched out with these new CPUs/chipsets?

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Don't mind my ignorance if this is a stupid question, but have all of those hardware security issues been patched out with these new CPUs/chipsets?

Doubtful but it's possible when they come out we'll hear differently but I thought the side execution exploits are inherent to hyper threading technology. Being the newest they should at least have the latest patches included in the microcode and potentially optimized to minimize any performance issues. We may not see a true 'cure' until a drastically new architecture comes out and by then there will probably be something else to worry about.

 

[Brian_B]

This is what, Skylake +++++

So of course it needs a new chipset.

 

[Grimlakin]

Color me surprised... oh wait it's intel, nevermind.