Is Intel cooking up the fastest gaming laptop processor ever made?

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New benchmark results have been leaked that appear to show off the power of the upcoming Intel Core i9-10980HK, and if they're accurate, Intel is building an incredibly powerful mobile processor that could transform gaming laptops.

As part of Intel’s eagerly anticipated 10th generation Comet Lake-H processors, the Intel Core i9-10980HK will apparently come with eight cores and 16 threads, alongside a 45W TDP and base clock of 3.10GHz, which is a marked improvement over the 2.4GHz of the Intel Core i9-9980HK, which the chips is expected to replace.

It’s also rumored to reach a boost clock of 5GHz, and in a new leak of Geekbench benchmark results, it looks like the Intel Core i9-10980HK actually hits speeds of 5.27GHz – an incredibly high number for a laptop processor. If these results (which were shared on Twitter by @TUM_APISAK) are accurate, the chip would be the fastest gaming laptop CPU ever made.

Transforming gaming laptops

The rumored power of the Intel Core i9-10980HK could make any premium gaming laptop that uses it an incredibly powerful machine, and one that’s particularly adept at multitasking. It’s essentially bringing desktop-level performance to a laptop, and the potential of that is very exciting indeed.

The leaked benchmarks suggest a single-core score of 6,321 and a multi-core score of 32,038. As @TUM_APISAK points out on Twitter, the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU, a high-end chip from Intel’s arch rival, scored 5,228 and 31,614 points respectively in the same tests.

Real-world performance will differ, and AMD’s chip (like all of its AMD Ryzen 4000 series processors) is based on its 7nm process and new Zen 2 architecture, while Intel’s chip is based on a 14nm process and older architecture. However, these results seemingly suggest that Intel will keep its crown when it comes to laptop processor performance.

With AMD’s recent successes, this is a welcome bit of good news for Intel, and we can’t wait to see gaming laptops emerge with this kind of firepower in the near future.

Via Wccftech

Matt Hanson
Managing Editor, Core Tech

Matt is TechRadar's Managing Editor for Core Tech, looking after computing and mobile technology. Having written for a number of publications such as PC Plus, PC Format, T3 and Linux Format, there's no aspect of technology that Matt isn't passionate about, especially computing and PC gaming. Ever since he got an Amiga A500+ for Christmas in 1991, he's loved using (and playing on) computers, and will talk endlessly about how The Secret of Monkey Island is the best game ever made.