It was only a matter of time before we started to get an idea of what Comet Lake would look like in respect to pricing. Leaker and dataminer momomo on Twitter has finally found a listing somewhere that shows the prices of 3 Comet Lake SKUs: the 10900, the 10700K, and the 10700. These prices are in Canadian and converted into USD we get about $500 for the 10900, $420 for the 10700K, and $360 for the 10700. The listing also says it will arrive in mid to late June but that is subject to change in these times.
At a glance, these prices don’t exactly seem competitive. The 10900, a locked part, is already more expensive than the nominally $500 3900X, which already enjoys a $50-60 price cut on Newegg and Amazon, putting it closer to $450. Given that the K in the 10700K costs about $60 more than the 10700, we may be looking at nearly a $550 price tag for the unlocked 10 core 10900K. The 10700K and the 10700 also don’t look terribly competitive, being somewhat more expensive than both the $340 3800X and the $300 3700X.
Though we don’t know the exact performance of these new CPUs, it’s not hard to guess given that it is on the same 14nm process and uses the same Skylake architecture (with very minor tweaks mostly related to security) that Intel has been basing their products on since 2015. We can expect slightly higher single threaded performance and notably better multi threaded performance, but neither improvement in these categories is likely to change the landscape of the desktop when AMD is offering up to 16 cores, far more than the 10 Intel has mustered.
While these prices aren’t official yet, it does not bode well for Comet Lake should Intel go ahead with the prices we see today. CPUs that offer less platform features, less efficiency, and in many cases lower performance are expected to be priced lower, but Intel seems to be confident that slightly better single threaded performance and typically better gaming performance will make up for all that. We’ll have to wait and see.
