The Core i9 10850K, a mysterious new addition to Intel's 10th generation Core processor family, has been officially announced. It has been listed on Intel's ARK website and a recommended price has been announced (via Anandtech).

The 10850K has been on the web for several weeks, first leaked benchmarks on Geekbench and then as a pre-built PC option on Digital Storm. However, Intel has not previously approved this new part.

It is now approved and the MSRP for bulk purchases (1,000 trays) is $453. This is $35 less than the MSRP for the 10900K. [10850K is essentially a lower-clocked version of the 10900K. Both chips have 10 cores and 20 threads, 20MB of Intel Smart Cache (L3 cache), and a TDP of 125W.

However, while the 10900K (MSRP $488 for a tray of 1,000) has a base clock of 3.7 GHz and a maximum boost clock of 5.3 GHz, the 10850K has a slightly more modest base clock of 3.6 GHz and a maximum boost clock of 5.2 GHz In other words, the 10850K is Intel's flagship. In other words, it is 100 MHz slower at both ends than Intel's flagship Comet Lake-S.

This is not a bad proposition, especially considering the $35 savings and the prospect of being able to apply a modest overclock to make up the difference. The actual retail price to the consumer will be a bit higher, but should still be about $35 less than the 10900K.

Incidentally, the reason for the 10850K's existence is probably to fill the gap caused by the lack of CPUs in the 10900K. This is because if the 10850K did not have a large amount of overclocking headroom, it would be strange for Intel to add another SKU with such a reduced nominal frequency to its lineup.

Currently, there are no retail listings in the US, but in the UK, the i9 10850K in a retail box has arrived at Scan (via OC3D) for £479.99. This is £70 less than the price at which Scan sells the retail boxed 10900K, so it will be interesting to see how the price disparity plays out in the US when the 10850K inevitably lands at places like Amazon and Newegg.