The new Intel Coffee Lake lineup is just around the corner. Ahead of its launch later this year, more specifications have been leaking weekly. So far, we’ve seen a CPU-Z screenshot for one of the engineering samples, likely the Core i7 8700K. We’ve also seen what appears to be a quad core 15W U-series processor as well. In the latest leak, we now have more detailed specifications for 3 different hexacore processors.
Coffee Lake uses the same 14nm process as Kaby Lake and uses the architecture from Skylake. However, Intel has optimised the design even more, claiming a 30% performance increase from the same power draw. Part of this performance increase is likely due to an increased core count. The top mainstream core count goes from 4 cores 8 threads to 6 cores and 12 threads. Beyond that, Intel is keeping everything under wraps.
Intel Coffee Lake Lineup Shows Strong Potential
In the latest leaks, we have a spec table for 3 6 cores processors. Starting off, we have the likely i7 8700K. This chip has a 95W TDP, 3.7 GHz base clock, 4 GHz boost for 4/6 cores, 4.2 GHz for dual core and 4.3 GHz for quad core. Next up is another 95W chip but with much lower clocks. We have a 3.2 GHz base clock with 3.4 GHz boost for 4/6 cores, and 3.6 GHz boost for 1/2 cores. It is also unlocked but the clock speeds are quite low. Last of all, we have the 65W chip which actually clocks quite fast. It has a base clock of 3.1 GHz but 4/6 core turbos to 3.9 GHz. Dual core boost is 4.1 GHz while single core goes up to 4.2 GHz. This is likely an i7 T series chip.
All 3 chips use the same LGA 1151 platform so there is a chance that 100 and 200 series motherboards will work. DDR4 support maxes out at 2400 MHz along with GT2 graphics and 12MB of L3 cache. Overall, Intel looks to have a strong starting lineup for Coffee Lake. All that is left to make it competitive against AMD’s Ryzen is the pricing. One thing to note is that with Core i7 and maybe Core i5 moving up to hexacore, will Core i3 become the new quads.
I’m intrigued, I will admit. If they make it comparable to the older 6 cores like the 5820k, at a reasonable price, it would make a compelling option…
i don’t get it, say a quad core is now Hexa, so core count is up by base 50% and add optimizations to the mix but the performance is only up by 30%???
may be i am missing something?
It’s a performance/power improvement, and these 6 core CPU’s reach 95W compared to 65W for current quad cores, which is close to parity in terms of performance/power. The 65W chip here doesn’t look bad, but perhaps it doesn’t work as well in practice as the specs seem to indicate. In any case most likely the 30% figure comes from specific benchmarks which don’t scale linearly with core count.
Also IIRC the 30% figure was in the context of low power mobile processors, where 4 cores will be available instead of 2. It’s still a really low figure in that context (even more so than 6 vs 4 cores).
If the price is kept lower than the previous 6 core cpu and they are going to be using 1151, and supporting the Z170 and Z270 boards this would be good news, however I can’t see Intel doing us all this favour.
The 7700K becomes the new top end i5-8600k