Many of us have been expecting some announcement from Intel on the Comet lake desktop processor front. We've already seen many motherboards names based on the new Z490 chipset leak and complete product listings. But nothing was mentioned during CES.

The following information, however, is based on chatter/rumor. While Intel did not give an official explanation, Germany based and well respected Computerbase notes that industry sources revealed Intel does not want to launch the new procs just yet because they seeing power consumption exceeding 300W, and are trying to optimize their design before launching them to the market. Intel's and AMD's turbo bins are a huge grey area. While 5+ GHz might look nice on a box, such high frequencies are refined by duration timings E.g. as example: instead of running all-core 5 GHz for 30 seconds, you can tweak that in the BIOS firmware to become 15 seconds to get that overall TDP more confined. You can think of such tweak to further enhance power draw. So according to the chatter, some motherboard manufacturers revealed that the ten-core product breaks the 300 Watt mark at maximum load. As a reality check, the 10-core i9 10900K should get a 125W TDP.

This high consumption would not just be a bit awkward, but manufacturers have also already designed their motherboards for certain specifications higher energy consumption could bring problems in relation to VRM designs. LGA 1200 motherboards from Asrock, Asus and Gigabyte have been ready to launch for a while. So the rumor is that the i9-10900K with 10 cores and higher frequencies can exceed 300W. We will have to wait to see if that is true though. Perhaps we'll learn more closer to the Computex timeframe.

Below the expected lineup, which is unofficial and unconfirmed by Intel.

Intel reportedly delayed 10th gen Desktop Due to high (300w) power consumption