Refreshed Apple iMac Leaks With Custom 10-Core Comet Lake-S CPU And Radeon 5300 Pro GPU
The device in question appeared in a Geekbench listing that was unearthed by twitter leaker _rogame. What’s interesting about the benchmark result is that the iMac is apparently running an unreleased 10th generation Intel Comet Lake-S processor: the Core i9-10910, which is apparently a variant of the existing Core i9-10900. It's not uncommon for Intel to produce special SKUs just for Apple, so we're not surprised by this revelation.
The Core i9-10900 has a base clock of 2.8GHz, boost clock of 5.2GHz, and a 65W TDP. However, the alleged Core i9-10910 has a higher base clock of 3.6GHz, but a lower boost clock of 4.7GHz while raising the TDP to 95W. Both processors include 20MB of L3 cache and feature a 10-core/20-thread design.
[Apple iMac 2020]
— _rogame (@_rogame) July 1, 2020
Intel Core i9-10910
1 Processor, 10 Cores, 20 Threads
GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 165 Stepping 5
AMD Radeon Pro 5300 Compute Engine
20 Compute Units
1.65GHz core clock
4GB VRAM
Apple Inc. Mac-CFF7D910A743CAAF AAPJ1851,1https://t.co/RLXyEapa4z pic.twitter.com/bjul5rnZq5
It was also revealed that the new iMac is rocking an unreleased Radeon Pro 5300 GPU. Like Intel, AMD is no stranger to creating custom SKUs for Apple, as last month the company introduced the Radeon Pro 5600M. This new SKU is likely based on the desktop version of the Radeon Pro 5300 and is sporting a core clock of 1650Hz with 4GB of onboard memory.
At this point, it will be interesting to see how many customers will be willing to continue purchasing Intel-based Mac computers now that they know custom Apple Silicon is on the way. Apple has already claimed that its custom processors will be unmatched when it comes to performance-per-watt, and that these chips will form the backbone of its future Macs.
While Apple will be releasing Intel-based Macs during the next two years, they will increasingly become the minority in the company’s product lineup. And eventually, Apple will stop supporting the processors in future versions of macOS. If Apple’s promise of kickass performance turns out to be right, we could foresee the company having a hard time moving these Intel-based Macs… at least for customers that don’t need x86-64 compatibility without a performance hit.
With that being said, it won’t be long before we can see for ourselves how these new Arm-based Macs will perform; a new 13-inch MacBook Pro and 24-inch iMac are rumored to be the first products to launch later this year with Apple Silicon.
