Intel had a complicated year in 2018, but does it still hold the top spot in the CPU landscape?
You can’t avoid the fact that 2018 was simply a bizarre year for PC components overall – especially when it comes to the best processors. Intel spent the whole year churning out microarchitecture after microarchitecture, in an attempt to prevent AMD from taking too much market share.
But, throughout the myriad products Intel released this year, we were left wondering if there was something missing.
So, we’re going to dive into everything Intel achieved over the last year, creating a sort of report card on how the tech giant handled 2018.
Intel didn’t exactly start 2018 off on the right foot – a white paper from Google Project Zero revealed the Spectre and Meltdown exploits that made 90% of Intel processors vulnerable to attack. Intel immediately responded, saying it would fix the exploits. However, there was a ton of confusion out there related to these fixes.
Initially, Intel suggested that these fixes would impact stability and performance by up to 30%, which it later redacted, saying that the slowdown would be ‘workload-related’, and that most users wouldn’t notice any change. And, eventually the patches made their way through Windows Update, but not everyone got a happily ever after.
In April, Intel said that certain older processors wouldn’t be getting the update, namely the Intel Core i7 900 series, due to issues with the microarchitecture itself. It also cited the fact that most of these older processors weren’t being serviced anyway.
Luckily, if you buy a newer Intel Coffee Lake Refresh processor you have nothing to worry about.
In a move that threw us all for a loop, Intel teamed up with AMD earlier in the year to produce 8th-generation Kaby Lake processors for laptops with AMD Vega graphics. Especially in a year when Intel has been plotting its own GPUs, this team up with its biggest rival kind of came out of nowhere. But, you know what? It paid off.
These Kaby Lake G processors provided awesome performance without some of the pitfalls that dedicated graphics experience. Laptops like the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 showed great performance, not just in professional workloads, but even in gaming. That’s right, these laptop CPUs enabled a pretty decent gaming experience on laptops that were thin, light and convertible.
Of course, Intel doesn’t just make chunks of silicon, it also makes full-fledged computers occasionally. And, the Intel Hades Canyon NUC, beyond having an awesome name, is genuinely one of the best gaming PCs you can get – as long as you’re looking for a very tiny machine.
