Intel Core i3 8300 With 4 Cores Spotted But is it Real?

In just a short while, Intel will release their new Coffee Lake lineup. Intel is expected to shake up their entire mainstream lineup with the new CPUs. So far, we’ve seen leaks for the top end Core i5 and Core i7 models which feature 6 cores. However, we have yet to see anything from the Core i3 and Pentium lineups until today. The new Core i3 8300 has just been spotted. More importantly, it reportedly features 4 cores with HyperThreading. Keep in mind that this is an unconfirmed report so take everything with a truckload of salt.

Coffee Lake uses the same 14nm process as Kaby Lake and uses the architecture from Skylake. 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.

Quad Core i3 Makes Sense for Intel

This new Core i3 8300 is amazing a quad core. This is a first for the Core i3 lineup which has always been dual cores. The chip is clocked at 4 GHz but that might not be its real clock speed. Just like any other Core i3, HyperThreading is enabled, giving 8 threads in total. The cache numbers match up with what we expect from a HyperThreading enabled quad core processor. The key caveat is that the source is unreliable.

Even if this chip might be fake, it does fit in with certain lines of speculation. One thing to note is that with Core i7 and maybe Core i5 moving up to hexacore, there is a gap for quad cores. This can either be filled by quad core i5s or i3s. Having quad core i5s makes sense given the current lineup. However, it will be confusing to customers to have i5 hexacore and quad cores. This raises the possibility of Core i3 being the new quad core lineup with HT, with Pentiums being plain quads and Celerons being the dual cores.