Something to look forward to: A new leak reveals that Intel's upcoming Core i3-10100, the lowest end chips in the lineup, will launch with four cores and eight threads. The current generation i3's don't have Hyper-Threading, so this will be a nice performance boost to the entry-level market.

Eagle-eyed Twitter user TUM_APISAK spotted a new submission to the SiSoftware benchmark database that appears to show some performance details of Intel's upcoming Comet Lake Core i3-10100. The 4-core, 8-thread feature is most notable since only two years ago, you would have had to spend about $350 to get that kind of core count. The i3-10100 will launch at roughly $120 or about one third the cost.

The addition of Hyper-Threading to their i3 lineup is certainly a response to the success of Ryzen processors. AMD can offer more cores for less and that has hurt Intel's market share.

The chip on SiSoft's database is likely an engineering sample, so the actual specs and benchmark results may change by launch time. Currently, the chip is running at 3.6GHz with 4x 256kB L2 cache and 6MB of L3 cache. We don't know much about boost clocks, but other leaks have put it at 4.4GHz for this chip.

The Comet Lake platform will be built on Intel's 14nm +++ lithography and will likely feature Hyper-Threading across the board. Rumors show the i5 variant having 6 cores / 12 threads, the i7 having 8 cores / 16 threads, and the i9 having 10 cores / 20 threads. Comet Lake is expected to launch in early 2020.