Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs to Launch in October 2017

Intel’s just hosted a behind-the-scenes Facebook live stream, finding some time for a cheeky tease of the release date for its 8th Gen Intel Core Coffee Lake processors. While Gregory Bryant, senior vice president, was having a chat about Intel 8th Gen CPUs, he placed down a coffee cup with the word ‘October’ emblazoned across. Hinting much?

Don’t worry, that’s not all. Another Intel employee in the background is also sipping from a cup of coffee with ‘10.2017’ written on it. Either Intel be trolling, or we’re powering towards a next-gen CPU launch next month. My money’s on the latter.

Somewhat confusingly, the 8th Gen of Intel Core processors will consist of a mixture of Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Cannonlake. This kind of flies in the face of the typical generations we’ve come to expect, splitting the CPUs across architectures and, in the case of Cannonlake, even process nodes. Previously, and CPUs of the same generation would same the same CPU microarchitecture and process node.

The 8th Gen Kaby Lake chips will be the domain of new mobile chips, while Coffee Lake is where we’ll find the newest crop of desktop processors. So far we know of a total six different desktop Coffee Lake CPUs, including the first ever quad-core i3’s with the Intel Core i3-8350K and the Intel Core i3-8100. Lastly there are the Cannonlake 8th Gen Intel Core CPUs, making the actual next-gen jump to the 10nm fabrication process at some point in 2018.

It’s quite difficult to gauge just where the initial Coffee Lake CPUs will fall on the performance scale, but it’s a further optimisation rather than the dramatic improvement we expect from Cannonlake. That doesn’t stop Intel claiming some people will be “seeing a 13x performance improvement”, provided they’ve got a “five-year-old PC or older” of course. Some curiously transparent spin on offer there.

CPU	Cores (Threads)	Base Clock	Boost Clock				GPU	L3 Cache	TDP	Memory Support	Socket
			Single Core	Dual Core	Quad Core	Hexa Core
Intel Core i7 8700K	6 (12)	3.7 GHz	4.7 GHz	4.6 GHz	4.4 GHz	4.3 GHz	UHD Graphics 630 (GT2)	12 MB	95 W	DDR4-2666	LGA 1151
Intel Core i7 8700		3.2 GHz	4.6 GHz	4.5 GHz	4.3 GHz	4.3 GHz			65 W
Intel Core i5 8600K	6 (6)	3.6 GHz	4.3 GHz	4.2 GHz	4.2 GHz	4.1 GHz		9 MB	95 W	TBA
Intel Core i5 8400		2.8 GHz	4.0 GHz	3.9 GHz	3.9 GHz	3.8 GHz			65 W
Intel Core i3 8350K	4 (4)	4.0 GHz	TBA					8 MB	91 W	DDR4-2400
Intel Core i3 8100		3.6 GHz						6 MB	65 W

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