Intel Budget B360 Chipset Surfaces in SiSoftware

One the interesting things about the Intel Coffee Lake launch is how long it is taking. Instead of launching most of the lineup right away, we are only getting the high-end products for 2017. According to leaked slides, the low end of Coffee Lake won’t arrive till 2018. On top of CPUs, the chipsets are also rolling out in waves. Just spotted in SiSoftware, we have the still unreleased Intel B360 budget chipset.

The chipset popped up in the SiSoftware official live ranker. The motherboard in question is the SuperMicro C7B360-CB-M. If past naming convention remains unchanged, this means we have a B360 chipset in a Micro-ATX motherboard. The B360 is quite interestingly a step up from the old x50 naming scheme. This is likely due to AMD having taken up B350 with their own chipsets. With such a similar naming scheme, I imagine there will be a rush to use up future chipset names in the future as well.

Intel B360 Leak Points to Earlier than Expected Launch

The current Z370 chipset surfaced almost 90 days before its own launch. If we expect a similar timeframe, the B360 should arrive early in Q1 2018. This is in line with previous expectations which suggested a release before February 2018. Unfortunately, this means Intel will be missing out on the holiday period. However, the higher selling price of the Z370 may make up for reduced volume.

With B360, Intel will be able to offer a more compelling budget lineup.  Due to a bump in core counts, the current Coffee Lake lineup is quite budget friendly compared to the past. There are some signs that Intel rushed out Coffee Lake to counter AMD’s Ryzen. No matter the reason, it is good to finally see some major changes in CPU pricing and segmentation. Hopefully, the increased adoption of more cores will push consumer software to make use of these cores.