10th-Gen Intel Core i5-10400 6C/12T CPU Compared With 9th-Gen Intel Core i5-9400F, Showing Some Benefits With Hyper-Threading

The 10^th Generation 14nm Intel Comet Lake Core Series processors are being rapidly tested. One of the biggest improvements over the currently available 9^th Generation Intel Core Series is the availability of Hyper-Threading in some select mid-range CPUs and the new Intel Core i5-10400 is a great example that now packs double the Threads as compared to its predecessor, the Intel Core i5-9400F.

Intel recently announced its new Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs, and ChipHell forums have just posted a preview of the Core i5-10400 performance. A few select benchmarking figures of the upcoming 10^th Gen Intel Core i5 CPU indicates it is a decent mid-range Comet Lake CPU.

10^th-Gen Intel Core i5-10400 A 14nm CPU With 6 Cores Has 12 Threads Due To Hyper-Threading Enabled:

The Core i5-10400 is positioned as an affordable mid-range Comet Lake CPU. It is expected to launch this month and is priced at $182. It is manufactured on the highly mature 14nm Fabrication Node and is based on the Comet Lake Architecture. In terms of specifications, the 10^th-Gen Intel Core i5-10400 is a 6 Core, 12 Thread processor with a base clock of 2.9 GHz and a Turbo Boost of 4.3GHz. It appears to be a locked frequency CPU which means users cannot overclock the same.

Intel Core i5-10400 Tested, Significant Multi-Threaded Performance Gain Over i5-9400 https://t.co/XGZgSKY7MT pic.twitter.com/PE0Fg889ox

— TechPowerUp (@TechPowerUp) May 12, 2020

Coming to the comparison of 10^th-Gen Intel Core i5-10400 6C/12T CPU with the currently available 9^th-Gen Intel Core i5-9400F, the new iteration reportedly has some modest gains of 2 to 5 percent in single-core performance. However, owing to Hyper-Threading enabled, which wasn’t an option in the previous generation, the Intel Core i5-10400 posted an impressive 35 to 45 percent performance gains in CPU-Z, a 41.85 percent gain with Cinebench R20, and 45.05 percent gain with Cinebench R15.

Intel Core i5-10400 comes close to AMD Ryzen 5 3600 in leaked benchmarks: The soon-to-be-released Intel Core i5-10400 is just shy of beating AMD’s year-old Ryzen 5 3600 in leaked benchmarks. The Core i5-10400 is an affordable mid-range Comet Lake CPU… https://t.co/aYKgc5AnBT

— Online Listing (@onlinelisting) May 12, 2020

Interestingly, despite being a new 10^th Generation Intel CPU, the Intel Core i5-10400 didn’t fare so well against  AMD Ryzen 5 3600, which launched last year. It is concerning to note that the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 posted 5 to 10 percent single-core gains over the Core i5-10400. The AMD CPU also outperformed the Intel CPU when it comes to multi-core performance. The year-old AMD CPU scored 3746 in Cinebench R20’s multi-core test, which is quite higher than the 3186 scored up by Intel’s mid-range CPU.

10^th-Gen Intel Core i5-10400 A 14nm CPU Benchmark Improvements Important To Entry-Level Gamers?

The 10^th-Gen 14nm Intel Comet Lake i5-10400 comes with a 200 MHz higher boost clock, a little more L3 cache, and has Hyper-Threading so that it can handle threaded workloads better. Apart from these features, the new CPU is identical to its predecessor.

Intel Core i5-10400 Benchmarks

Specs:
Comet Lake, 6C/12T, 2.9/4.3 GHz, 1.5+12 MB L2/L3, 65W TDP, 182$ (F-Series 157$)

3DM13 FireStrike (Physics)
18049

3DM13 TimeSpy (CPU)
7490

Cinebench R15 (MT)
1351

Cinebench R20 (MT)
3215

WinRAR
19080

wPrime (1024M)
118,2 sec

— CK's Technology News (@CKsTechNews) May 5, 2020

Incidentally, there are two major differences between 9^th-Gen Intel Core i5-9400F and 10^th-Gen Intel Core i5-10400 6C/12T CPU. The latter comes with integrated graphics (iGPU). Additionally, the new CPU requires a new motherboard as it is not compatible with the older socket. The new CPU requires an LGA 1200 Socket such as Z490/H470 or B460. Speaking of cache, the L3 cache for Gen Intel Core i5-10400 has increased to 12MB from 9MB in the previous generation of Coffee Lake CPUs.

The new Intel Core i5 is certainly not meant for serious gamers or multimedia editing professionals. The 10^th-Gen Intel Core i5-10400 6C/12T CPU is a decent mid-range chip when it comes to gaming performance and can be considered an excellent choice for any office productivity work.