Intel introduces Coffee Lake generation of desktop processors

Intel has announced its eighth Core generation of processors. These are two Core i3 quadcores, two Core i5 hexacores without HyperThreading and two Core i7 hexacores with HyperTreading.

Intel mainly focuses on gamers, content creators and overclockers with the processors. Like the predecessors Kaby Lake, Skylake and Broadwell, the Coffee Lake chips are produced at 14nm. The speed gains have to come for the most part from the increase in core count. This concerns the first quadcores that appear as Core i3 and the first hexacores that appear as Core i5. The architecture of the cpu and gpu has not changed compared to Kaby Lake.

The increase in cores is accompanied by a decrease in clock speed compared to the Kaby Lake-S generation, although the Boost speed is slightly higher. The lower base clock speed probably has to do with maintaining the tdp. The processors are made on Intel’s optimized 14nm++ process, which further ensures that the tdp’s do not increase significantly.

This all adds up to a 25 percent gain in fps performance for Gears of War 4, according to Intel, when a system with a Core i7-8700K processor is compared to an Intel Core i7-7700K processor. In addition, Intel claims that the processors provide a 32 percent faster processing of 4k panorama videos.

The introduction is accompanied by the arrival of the Z370 chipset, with support for up to 40 PCI-e 3.0 lanes, while now also ddr4-2666 memory is supported. In addition, there is support for Thunderbolt 3, although it is still unclear whether separate chips are needed for this, the chipset can handle Optane memory and Intel mentions support for hdmi 2.0a, but an lspcon is needed for this.

The processors will be available from October 5.