[chucker]

Intel has found yet more ways to make their line-up confusing as hell. They can't deliver Ice Lake in sufficient volume to make that the one and only path for their range of ~5W-28W CPUs, so they're also launching new replacements for Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake.

Like Ice Lake-U and -Y, Comet Lake-U and -Y will be referred to as "tenth-generation". Luckily(?), Comet Lake has the old numbering scheme, unlike Ice Lake. So a chip called Core i7-1068G7 is a 10th-generation Ice Lake i7, but a Core i7-10710U is (obviously!) a 10th-generation Comet Lake i7. Duh.

In good news, Comet Lake-U has a new memory controller basically backported from Ice Lake. This means LPDDR4 is coming to it, which means RAM that is higher performance (although not quite as high as what Ice Lake offers), lower energy, and, drumroll, 32 GB in the LPDDR form factor! And of course just as Intel decided to do that, they also decided not to do that for Comet Lake-Y. Because… why be consistent about that?

Comet Lake-U also integrates Wi-Fi 6 (a.k.a. 802.11ax), which is sort of interesting. Comet Lake-Y does not.

Lastly, Comet Lake-U goes up to six cores at 15W TDP, and Comet Lake-Y goes up to four at 7W TDP.

So, in short, these Comet Lake parts are an interesting alternative to Ice Lake. Ice Lake has a faster memory controller and way better integrated graphics, but Comet Lake has more CPU cores. That's kind of a weird trade-off, especially considering laptops of this class rarely have dedicated graphics. So a vendor like Apple or Microsoft can either choose… better graphics, or better CPU. Um.

There's also a wholly separate interesting thing called Lakefield, which combines Ice Lake (well, technically, its Sunny Cove core) and Tremont, the new Intel Atom microarchitecture. It's a hybrid Intel Core / Intel Atom chip, perhaps a bit in the way Apple has their "Fusion" technique, and ARM in general has "big.LITTLE": require a lot of performance, and the beefier Ice Lake chip sets in; stop requiring it, and Tremont will do. This cooooould be (or have been) interesting for something like the 12-inch MacBook, but I just don't see Apple using this sort of thing. It also feels a lot like something Intel tries, doesn't see much uptake on, and then throws away without ever revising it/iterating upon it.

Back to Comet Lake. It's not clear to me when — I've seen a leaked roadmap suggest Q2/2020, but I've also seen claims that there will be first shipments later this year. But at some point, Comet Lake-H and -S will apparently happen, sort of reunifying some of the Skylake offshoots after the weird mess of Kaby Lake Refresh + Coffee Lake + Whiskey Lake + Amber Lake + Cascade Lake. Comet Lake-H and -S are supposed to offer ten cores, which makes sense if the -U does six now.

Well.

What if the -U offering LPDDR4 means that the -H will, too? That could mean that the next 13-inch MacBook Pro offers 32 GB, and the 15-inch might even go to 64 (no doubt Apple would make that an insanely expensive BTO option, of course).

What if Apple got a deal with Intel that they can use Comet Lake-H very early on, and the 16-inch MacBook Pro does in fact ship with it?

Are you getting it? These aren't three products!

Wait, wrong presentation.