10th-Gen CPU Buyers Guide We Ranked Every New Intel Laptop CPU For You

Six Cores Vs. Four Cores, and 10nm Vs. 14m. There’s a lot to think about.

- Gordon Mah Ung

If your brain broke when Intel announced its 10th-gen Comet Lake (go.pcworld.com/cmet) laptop CPUs, which will sell alongside its 10th-gen Ice Lake chips, we understand.

Among the two different manufacturing processes (one advanced and one very refined) as well as very different graphics cores, core counts, and power levels, it’s confusing enough to make you want to switch to a Windows on ARM laptop (just kidding, we’re not that frustrated). Even Intel itself admits there “might be some confusion” between its different 10th-gen CPUs.

Fortunately for you, we’ve combed through all of Intel’s newest 10th-gen laptop CPUs to try to find the strengths and weaknesses of the 19 different parts. Although we haven’t personally touched each different model integrated into a laptop, we’re comfortable with our performance forecast based on the fact that we’ve actually already run 10th-gen Ice Lake though its paces (go.pcworld.com/ilpv). As 10th-gen Comet Lake shares much in common with the 8th-gen Whiskey Lake U, we know what to expect there too.

But first, here are the details of Intel’s entire 10th-gen laptop CPU lineup to date.

Yup, that’s a lot of information as well as a lot of different options. If you’re the kind of consumer who doesn’t care about code names, manufacturing process, clock speed, core count or graphics execution units but you don’t want to make a buying mistake, we’ve translated the hellish Excel spreadsheet of the CPU lineup into concrete use cases.

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