Intel has confirmed its first 8th-gen processors, but they’re not Coffee Lake. Read about the new processors here.
Intel has revealed its first 8th-generation processors and we’ve got all the details including release date and specs. However, the first chips coming to market aren’t Coffee Lake.
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Intel officially announced its 8th-generation processors on 21 August.
The firm says these chips – which are for mobile devices such as laptops and 2-in-1s – will arrive in September with 145 planned devices coming from manufacturing partners, 80 of which will hit shelves in time for Christmas. You can expect plenty of new devices with the chips to be announced at IFA 2017.
There are four processors to start with and none of them are Coffee Lake. Instead they are based on the previous Kaby Lake architecture. That means a longer wait for Coffee Lake processor – see below for the rumours and details.
As mentioned, the first set of 8th-gen chips will be a Kaby Lake refresh rather than a jump straight to the newer Coffee Lake architecture.
That might be a disappointment for some but Intel promises a 40 percent performance gain compared to 7th-gen processors. A difference the firm claims you can „see and feel“ and „eclipses anything in the industry“.
Of that 40 percent, 25 has come from adding two more cores and the rest is either design tweaks (resulting in a higher frequency) or improved manufacturing.
For those on machines five years old, upgrading to one of these new processors will mean double the performance. This is based on a comparison of Core i5s.
You can see the full specs for the first 8th-gen chips below. They are all U-series mobile processors that are 15W, either Core i5 or Core i7 and based on a 14nm+ manufacturing process.
It’s worth noting that there’s no change in the graphics department and Intel claims efficiency stays the same, so you can expect battery life of up to 10 hours on ’sleek designs‘ like ultrathin laptops.
As per rumours, Intel did announce 8th-generation processor in August (see above) but they are a Kaby Lake refresh.
What Intel did say at the same time, though, is that desktop chip will arrive in fall with more to come after that.
We assume that these chips will be based on Coffee Lake and Intel confirmed that although the first four 8th-gen chips are 14nm+, there will be ones coming using a 10nm manufacturing process.
Cannon Lake, which could be the 8th or 9th gen Core i range, will use this smaller 10nm process, but these chips won’t go on sale for your home PC until the first half of 2018. The first Cannon Lake CPUs will be for servers, most likely in data centres.
Intel recently tweeted that it’s almost finished designing the second-generation of Cannon Lake, which is codenamed Ice Lake:
No-one expected Intel to use the 14nm process a fourth time, especially as Intel has already waved a 10nm Cannon Lake chip around at CES in January 2017.
However, as the slide shows, it will have a similar performance improvement that Kaby Lake did over Skylake.
Intel Ice Lake architecture which is possibly the most likely for 9th-gen chips and will use a 10nm+ process.
So we know – roughly – when the 8 th -gen Core processors are launching but how is Intel going to extract yet more performance without a process change?
If you believe the leak from WCCFTech, one way is to increase the core count. The table below summarises the leaked spec sheet:
You can take these four new processors with a pinch of salt for now: there are conflicting reports that the Core i5 models will be the first ever to support Hyper-threading, but the specs above show six-core chips with six threads, i.e. no Hyper-threading.
What’s interesting is that the Core i7-8700K – aside from being an octacore chip – is that the all-core boost speed is 4.0GHz, not a whole lot slower than the 4.3GHz single-core boost speed.
The other spec that will attract Intel fans is that the chips will use Socket 1151. They could – in theory – work in your existing 100- or 200-series motherboard, so long as manufacturers are able to issue a BIOS update so they can boot with the new chips installed.
Of course, it’s too early for any pricing info, but this will be a key factor since AMD has already launched its Ryzen 5 and 7 processors.
The range-topping Ryzen 7 1800X costs £499 and is also a six-core, 12-thread CPU. It has a base clock of 3.6GHz and a boost clock of 4.0GHz. And, like the rumoured i7-8700K, it’s unlocked so you can extract more performance from it with the right supporting components.
Typically, or at least in the past, the company would come up with a new architecture (the chip’s design) and then follow up with a ‘process shrink’ the following year to boost performance.
Recently, Moore’s Law, which says that the number of transistors that will fit in a given area will double every 12-18 months, has slowed down. Or so it seems.
Look beyond the headline 14nm figure, and Intel has actually improved the process without changing the figure. According to some sources, Intel refers to Skylake as 14nm, Kaby Lake as 14nm+ and Coffee Lake at 14nm++.
These aren’ t simply names to delineate the different generations: there are actual performance improvements behind them. One is the move to FinFET – effectively a 3D transistor, as used by the latest graphics card GPUs – and along with other tweaks, it’s probably unfair to call Coffee Lake a 14nm CPU, or at least lump it in with Skylake and call it the same thing.
In any case, Intel reckons Coffee Lake will offer a 15 percent boost in performance over Kaby Lake, which itself is 15 percent quicker than Skylake.
So a Coffee Lake-powered PC should be noticeably quicker than a three-year old machine.
Intel is also likely to continue to improve the on-board GPU performance, which may well account for a decent chunk of that overall 15 percent bump. We’ ll have to wait until we see the benchmark results to know for sure, of course.
The WCCFTech report claims the 8th-gen chips will feature Intel’s GT2-level graphics core with a minimum clock speed of 350 MHz.
