New slides leaked by XFastest confirm that Comet Lake-S CPUs (Intel’s Coffee Lake Refresh successor) will be powered on the all-new LGA 1200 socket and 400-series chipset. This is reportedly due to the lineup’s increased core counts (up to 10 cores/20 threads), which demand beefier components with improved power delivery.
Case in point: the top Comet Lake-S part is rated with a 125 W TDP, which is significantly higher than the Core i9-9900K’s 95 W TDP. Critics aren’t happy with the new motherboard requirement because these chips are yet another round of 14 nm parts.
As far as other specifications go, Comet Lake-S might maintain compatibility for DDR4-2666 memory modules and have the same 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes as current Coffee Lake Refresh chips. From a platform standpoint, there is support for Wi-Fi 802.11ax, Bluetooth 5, Intel Optane memory, Thunderbolt 3 and up to 30 chipset I/O lanes to distribute among the SATA III, USB 3.1 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports.