Intel Coffee Lake May Bring 6 Cores to Mainstream

With each process node shrink, it’s getting harder and harder to reach the next. Intel is no stranger to these difficulties which have led to delays in the 14nm and now the 10nm nodes. Due to low yields on the 10nm process, Cannonlake will be arriving for the mobile market only. This leaves Coffee Lake, a stop gap for the desktop platform still on 14nm. A new series of leaks have come out detailing what Coffee Lake will look like.

According to the leak, there will be 4 different main SKUs, Coffee Lake-X, Coffee Lake-S, Coffee Lake-H and Coffe Lake-U. These correspond to the Extreme, Mainstream, Notebook and Ultra Low Power markets.  As we know from Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X, Intel is shaking things up for their new Extreme lineup. While Skylake-X will be the main lineup on the new LGA 2066 X299 platform, Kaby Lake-X will supplement with quad-core chips. This is where Coffee Lake-X appears to be stepping in, offering up to 6 cores as a Kaby Lake-X replacement. It will be intersting to see if Skylake-X will have hexacores as well.

Next up we have the mainstream Coffee Lake-S  and Cofee Lake-H chips. In a long-awaited development, Intel appears to be bringing 6 cores to the regular user. This means you will no longer have to step up to the more expensive Extreme platform to get more than 4 cores. Frankly, we’ve been stuck on 4 cores for the mainstream for far too long. Mirroring the desktop mainstream, the mainstream notebook chips also get hexacores as well. While less necessary for notebooks, it means the high end notebooks won’t have to resort to desktop SKUs as they sometimes do. Lastly, we have the U lineup which gets bumped up to quad cores.

As you might expect, the shift to hexacores for the mainstream platform is going to require a socket change. The new unnamed socket will use the new 300 series chipsets, replacing the yet to be launched 200 series. Intel has bundled a lot more of the standard features into their PCH, reducing the need for custom third part controllers. Hopefully, we get more details in the coming months. Coffee Lake is expected to arrive in late 2017/earl 2018 which gives AMD some breathing room for Zen early next year.