Intel Comet Lake purported pricing details spilled, and they may cost about the same as 9th-gen desktop CPUs

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At least from the rough conclusions we can draw from a Canadian retailer’s pre-order price tags

(Image credit: Future)

Intel’s 10th-gen Comet Lake desktop processors are set to be launched very soon, rumor has it, and we’ve caught a glimpse of some alleged retail prices for these next-gen CPUs courtesy of an online retailer.

As highlighted by @momomo_us, a regular hardware leaker on Twitter, purported prices on a few Comet Lake chips have been spilled by DirectDial, a Canadian retailer (and so they are in Canadian dollars, of course).

So the price for the Core i9-10900 is $679 CAD, which works out to be around $487 in US currency (about £390, AU$770). For the Core i7-10700K you’re looking at $585 CAD or around $419 (about £335, AU$660), and also listed is the Core i7-10700 which is pitched at $506 CAD or around $363 (about £290, AU$575).

Of course, there are a number of things to bear in mind here, before we get too carried away with ourselves. Firstly, these are pre-order product listings, and their accuracy needs to be taken with a pinch of salt anyway – and also note that these are listings from a business supplier, and we can’t simply directly translate the price into US dollars (or any other currency for that matter).

However, what we can do is compare the pricing of DirectDial’s existing Intel CPUs to get an idea of the relative cost compared to current 9th-gen parts.

So going by this ballpark indication, we’re looking at roughly the same pricing. For example the Core i9-9900 is $679 CAD, just a dollar away from the price of its successor, and the other CPUs are similarly very close in terms of their price tags.

In other words, the rough conclusion we can draw is that Intel is going to pitch the price of the incoming Comet Lake desktop CPUs at about the same level as its current Coffee Lake products. Of course, bear in mind that this really is just a rough conclusion, but it’s an interesting – and not entirely unexpected – one nonetheless.

AMD matchup

We can also compare these prices to how much DirectDial charges for rival Ryzen 3000 chips. And in this case, let’s look at the Ryzen 9 3900X which DirectDial sells for $766 CAD or around $549 (about £440, AU$865) – you get 12-cores with that CPU compared to 10-cores with the Core i9-10900 at $679 CAD or $487 (about £390, AU$770).

That’s not a bad comparison for Intel, mind – note further that the 10900 has a considerably lower TDP, too – but the potential issue is that you can find the 3900X much cheaper than this at other retailers, generally for around the $450 mark in the US. But of course, we can’t make that kind of comparison yet, based on these Canadian prices – and indeed we don’t know exactly how these chips will stack up performance-wise, either.

Another comparison is the Core i7-10700 versus the Ryzen 3700X, a battle of the 8-core CPUs, with the latter priced at $492 CAD which is around $352 (about £280, AU$555), so slightly less than Intel’s offering by a few percent at DirectDial (at the time of writing). But again, as with the 3900X, the 3700X can be had for a good chunk cheaper than that price elsewhere online.

We should underline again that it’s difficult to draw any vaguely solid conclusions from this, save for it seems that Intel is looking to pretty much hold in pricing terms with these next-gen chips – assuming these purported prices are on the money, so to speak.

Only time will tell how this Comet Lake versus Ryzen 3000 battle will really pan out, and a lot will depend on the actual performance we see from Intel’s CPUs. However, early leaks have cast some doubt on exactly how competitive Intel will be – and there are some question marks on the power consumption front with the flagship Comet Lake chip.

Another point to bear in mind here is that the appearance of chips for pre-order in Canada lends a bit more weight to another recent rumor, namely the one claiming that Intel will launch its next-gen Comet Lake CPUs on April 30. Apparently DirectDial will get its initial shipment of Comet Lake products on June 17, which again ties in with the previous on-sale timeframe of June that has previously been floated – but even if that is true right now, it could obviously change down the line.

Via Tom’s Hardware

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Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).