Intel reveals eight-core laptop CPU with 5GHz boost and overclocking

Intel has today brought the 9th Gen Core family of CPUs to mobile with the announcement of six new 45W H-Series SKUs, while also revealing a selection of new desktop CPUs.

While the world patiently waits for Intel to produce 10nm CPUs in volume, the company has been refining and refreshing its 14nm offerings. Most of you will be familiar with the existing 9th Gen Core desktop offerings like the Core i9-9900K, and today sees Intel bring the same Coffee Lake Refresh technology to mobile platforms. The six new 14nm SKUs cover Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 options, with both the Core i9-9980HK and Core i9-9880H sporting eight cores and 16 threads, which is a first for Intel’s Core family when it comes to laptops. The flagship part can also boost a single core up to 5GHz and has an unlocked multiplier allowing users to overclock it. Here's how the rest of the range stacks up:

You can expect laptop vendors to begin refreshing their gaming offerings with these chips immediately, and Intel says it has worked with its OEM partners with a holistic approach in order to optimise form factors and battery life.

Although most gaming laptops will include discrete graphics chips, the new Intel CPUs do include the same onboard Intel HD Graphics 630 as the previous-generation parts. Memory capacity support has technically doubled to 128GB of DDR4 over two channels, though we don’t imagine many laptops will be taking advantage of this. Intel Optane memory is supported too, including the upcoming Optane H10 devices that combine regular NAND flash with a high-speed Intel Optane cache module.

One upgrade over the older parts is the Wi-Fi, which now supports the Wi-Fi 6 standard (previously called 802.11ax), which offers high data rates and better power efficiency than Wi-Fi 5 (i.e. 802.11ac) and is better designed for environments with many connected devices.

‘Our new 9th Gen platform is designed to delight gamers, creators and performance users by giving them more of what they want,’ says Fredrik Hamberger, general manager of the Premium and Gaming Laptop Segments at Intel. ‘We are bringing desktop-caliber performance with up to 5 Ghz and 8 cores in a range of thinner systems and new level of connectivity with Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) so users can game or create where they want.’

Tacked onto the same announcement is an expansion of the 9th Gen Core desktop family, which as of today includes more than 25 products. These are essentially “gap filling” products that include the full range of Celeron, Pentium Gold, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 parts. Wi-Fi 6 support is included on these new processors, a first for desktop users.