Intel has finally officially announced its 10th generation H-series mobile CPUs. It may be hard to get too excited about this high-performance Comet Lake chip, as we have known for some time that it was coming. Thanks to some surprisingly accurate leaked information over the past few days, we have already told you all about the new Intel gaming laptop chips, all of which were finally made official today.

The crux of the matter is that this is another cue for Intel's aging 14nm++ manufacturing process. Like, for example, AMD's new Ryzen Mobile chips. But what we get is an existing process that can be pushed to the limit. In this case we are talking about pushing frequencies to the limit.

The headline numbers here are for the Core i910980HK, a top-of-the-line 8-core/16-thread CPU that claims a maximum operating frequency of 5.3 GHz. However, this is not the only chip on the market, with six more being released, four of which have single-core turbo frequencies of 5 GHz or higher.

This is great for technology, but it is also really good for us PC gamers. While we are slowly moving into a world where more cores are being utilized by game engines, there are actually many applications and games where frequency is the driving force rather than the number of cores.

There are a few other things about the new chips that are worth getting excited about, including Wi-Fi 6 and support for Thunderbolt 3. Wi-Fi improvements are always a good thing, and there are many positives about the new Wi-Fi 6 standard. [However, Thunderbolt 3 is especially welcome on laptops, as it supports connections of up to 3,000 MB/s and an increasing number of supported devices. [As we emphasized when we first heard about the Core i9 10980HK, the high potential for maximum turbo is a good thing, but these numbers mean little if the heat source of the laptop you choose cannot sustain such speeds for long.

The point is that we need to see how these chips perform in a real laptop before getting too excited.

However, Intel appears to be responding to the threat of AMD's Ryzen 9 4000 series with predictable bullishness.