Intel recently announced its new Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs, and someone over at the Chiphell forums has already shared some benchmark figures that give us a hint of what we can expect from the Intel Core i5-10400.

The leaker, known as 尾随至幻城, reportedly dropped the new i5-10400 into an MSI MAG Z490 Tomahawk motherboard with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 to run a series of benchmarks. 

The tester compared the i5-10400 to the Intel Core i5-9400F, which stacks up in the same place in the product stack.

The results were as follows: 

In single-threaded applications, the new Comet Lake chip hardly showed any performance gains over the 9th Gen Coffee Lake chip, edging out with a performance increase of just 4-8%. 

However, in multi-threaded tests the i5-10400 performed significantly better with improvements of up to 45%.

These results are explainable by the differences between the two chips. The new Comet Lake i5-10400 comes with a 200 MHz higher boost clock, a little more L3 cache and has been blessed with Hyper-Threading, so that it can handle threaded workloads better. Otherwise, the two chips are nearly identical, except that the 9400F doesn't have integrated graphics (iGPU) and drops into an older CPU socket.

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Of course, as with any pre-release data, you'll have to take these results with a grain of salt. But the numbers reported do make sense. We weren't expecting groundbreaking differences from Intel's new CPUs in the mid-segment. It's at the high-end where Intel is pushing the thermal envelopes of the Comet Lake CPUs to their absolute limits. That's where we expect things to get interesting.