Intel Corp. today added eight new chips to its portfolio with the introduction of Comet Lake, a central processing unit family for lightweight and power-efficient notebooks.

Comet Lake is based on the 14-nanometer Skylake architecture Intel launched back in 2015. The series is making its debut several weeks after the chipmaker unveiled Ice Lake, another CPU family aimed at the laptop market that uses its newer 10-nanometer manufacturing process.

Intel didn’t provide a direct performance comparison between the two lineups. However, it said the 14-nanometer Comet Lake chips are up to 16% faster than last year’s Whiskey Lake notebook processors. Meanwhile, the 10-nanometer Ice Lake CPUs perform 18% more calculations per clock cycle than last year’s Whiskey Lake processors, but have a lower clock frequency.

The top-end Comet Lake chip packs six processing cores that can run 12 threads at once. The series has a much slower integrated  graphics module than the one in Intel’s 10-nanometer CPUs, but adds the option for notebook makers to build their computers with a new type of memory called LPDDR4X. This will provide an indirect boost to application performance that could partially make up for the slower graphics. 

Comet Lake is split into two separate CPU groups. The four most powerful CPUs in the lineup, including the flagship 6-core chip, have a default thermal design power threshold of 15 watts, while the four lower-end units run at 7 watts. The latter CPUs also have a configuration option that lets manufacturers further bring down the threshold to as little as four to five watts if they’re building particularly lightweight notebooks.

Comet Lake gives Intel a stronger product selection on the lower end of the mobile computing spectrum. It should also help the company more easily meet chip demand as it upgrades its plants from making 14-nanometer chips to making 10-nanometer chips. Though Intel is already mass producing Ice Lake processors, the manufacturing roadmap is years behind the original schedule due to earlier production delays.

Comet Lake and Ice lake will start shipping with laptops ahead of the holiday shopping season.

The CPU families join the two new data center products that Intel introduced this month. The company unveiled a programmable accelerator card for servers and yesterday debuted a chip called Springhill that is specifically optimized to run artificial intelligence software.

Photo: Intel