Intel Core i9-10850K Review: The Real Intel Flagship

Conclusion: Bin to Win

Ever since we taught fancy rocks to think, despite the decades of research and billions of dollars that go into creating grand pyramid-scale structures at the nanoscale, it still is very much an imperfect process. The tiny nibs of shiny silicon that come out, even if they are made with the same design masks, will vary in peak performance, power, and potential.

There are levers and switches that both the designer and the manufacturer can use to adjust and move the variability of the processor quality to a more favorable outcome. Before these become products for end users, the processor maker has to decide where it draws the lines in production variability. Those lines have to take into account how many of a given processor will be produced, at what power, at what frequency, and at the end of it, cost and expected longevity.

Those lines in production variability give companies like Intel an opportunity to build its product stack to focus on different markets. A good processor that’s easy to make, for example, might fall within a 98% line and be really easy to do. As a company gets more aggressive with its design, and yield, we start looking at drawing lines where only 10000-in-a-million (1%) hit that target, or even fewer than that.

The current line of Comet Lake processors features two silicon designs. There’s a 10-core variant, which supplies all the retail parts offered at 6 cores (Core i5-K), 8 cores (Core i7), and 10 cores (Core i9). The other is a 6-core variant for everything else Core i3 and below, as well as some of the 6 core parts. Out of that 10-core variant, Intel sells 12-19 mainstream Core processors, 7 Xeon W-1200 processors, and an unknown number of embedded products.

Out of these, how many of the top Core i9-K does Intel expect to sell, and where does the line need to be drawn in the current design variability to meet that target with the wafer production expected? So the question becomes, where is the line drawn for something like Intel’s consumer flagship processor?

At this point someone like Intel has two choices.

They could draw the line at this exact intersection, regardless of performance. The performance and power figures would fall where they are, which in turn would affect the marketing strategy. The issue here is that the marketing strategy in-of-itself would directly affect how many of that product Intel tends to sell. Past sales performance is no guarantee of future success, and so this has to be managed.

The other choice is to draw the line at a point more aggressive, where Intel know it won’t be able to meet demand, but it will be able to leverage the increased performance processor in its marketing strategy and keep their premium product feeling premium. The problem here is if that line is drawn too aggressive – even those launch day performance figures look good, interest in the product will likely diminish if people can’t get hold of it, even with the higher performance level. This is important if system integrators that build machines directly to end-users can’t offer the flagship processor in their best systems.

Ultimately, this is what I think happened to Intel with the Core i9-10900K. The silicon quality level required to manufacturer the hardware was strict to provide a higher performance product, but too strict to be able to manufacturer a sufficient quantity to meet demand, especially for system integrators that rely on a steady source of good performance products. For all the plaudits Intel has received for eking out the 14nm process, the line for the 10900K was drawn too far, and the company wasn’t able to meet its own goals.

Thus entered the Core i9-10850K. A slightly less aggressive product, offered at a cheaper price, and because of the less aggressive bin, available in sufficient quantities to keep system builders and end-users happy if the 10900K was not in stock locally. In order for Intel to keep up volume of expected high-end Core i9 system sales, they had to re-bin to win.

Core i9-10850K Performance

Going through our benchmark tests, the performance differential between the Core i9-10850K and the Core i9-10900K is almost zero, so there’s nothing much that’s going to separate our conclusion of either chip.

In our CPU benchmark tests, the Core i9-10850K either matched the higher clocked part or was ever so slightly behind, often within error margins, but sometimes within 1-2%. In our CPU gaming tests, is was more of a mixed bag, with the 10900K taking advantage in CPU heavy tests, but the 10850K also getting a slight lead now and again.

The point at which the two processors mostly differ is on power and thermals. The Core i9-10850K is a less strict bin of the silicon, and this is showcased very much in a couple of metrics. If you get over the fact that both processors are going north of 250 W at full load, our Core i9-10850K was drawing 15-20W more peak power, which is 6-8% higher, despite being 100 MHz slower. This manifested moreso in the processor thermals, where we were easily going north of 100ºC on this newer processor.

It’s easy to get freaked out by a triple digit number, especially given that I was testing on an open test bed with a chunky copper cooler. At this stage it’s more about thermal gradients inside the processor and how easily the thermals can move – so while users will still need something sufficient to migrate the extra thermal energy, it isn’t as bad as it sounds. We saw no obvious example where the 10850K was hitting thermal throttling in our testing. It might mean that home users might want to make their annual PC dust removal and checkups a bit more often though.

Which to buy is a tough question. In my mind, if your heart is set on these two processors, at a MSRP $35 difference, I’d get the 10900K, just for the slightly better performing silicon, even if the performance isn’t going to be that different. But the stock levels are so varied for the 10900K that the difference in price, depending on location, has been $200+, making it less than viable.

The other alternative is to look at AMD, assuming there are AMD Ryzen 5000 processors in stock as well. At ~$450, the direct competitor is the Ryzen 7 5800X, which is eight cores and a 4.7 GHz turbo. With the Ryzen 7 5800X, there’s no worrying about excessive power or thermals, which in of itself is perhaps peace of mind.

On performance against AMD, the 5800X wins on single threaded loads by 15-20% and encoding, while the 10850K wins on rendering multithreaded workloads like Blender by up to 10%. For 1080p maximum gaming with our RTX 2080 Ti, the differences in the most modern titles are minor at best, even with 5% lows. Certain titles will lean up to 5-8% in one direction (FF14 to AMD, F1 2019 to Intel, Civ6 to AMD). If I had to choose between the Intel and AMD, I’d have to recommend the AMD, but I'm the sort of person who temperature watches when I'm doing a heavy workload.