Intel has finally announced it’s 8th Generation of CPUs known as Coffee Lake. According to Intel, the new chips are up to 32% faster compared to the previous gen(Kaby Lake) and up to 65% than a three-year-old system that would be used for video editing, gaming, and streaming. The most noticeable difference being the increased core counts all across the board.The i3 being 4 core processors instead of 2 cores, the i5 now has 6 cores instead of 4 without hyperthreading and the i7 comes with 6 cores along with hyperthreading which is not present on the i3 or i5.
Intel is calling the i7-8700k as the company’s “best gaming CPU to date” which is quite understandable as the i7-7700k is currently the undisputed king of gaming. According to AnandTech, Intel is offering six, eighth-gen desktop chips at launch, two for each processor class:
- i3-8100, with four cores / four threads and clocked at 3.6GHz for approximately $117
- i3-8350K, with four cores / four threads and clocked at 4.0GHz for approximately $168
- i5-8400, with six cores / six threads and clocked at 2.8GHz (with a boost of up to 4.0GHz) for approximately $182
- i5-8600K, with six cores / six threads and clocked at 3.6GHz (with a boost of up to 4.4GHz) for approximately $257
- i7-8700, with six cores / 12 threads and clocked at 3.2GHz (with a boost of up to 4.6GHz) for approximately $303
- i7-8700K with six cores / 12 threads and clocked at 3.8GHz (with a boost of up to 4.7GHz) for approximately $359
The upgrade to more cores isn’t cheap though as people will have to pay around $30 to $50 more on launch when compared to the 7th Gen Kaby Lake chips at launch. Alongside that, people will also have to invest in a new motherboard that will be built on the Z370 chipset. So this upgrade won’t be cheap but it will be worth it.
Glad to see that Intel took the hint from AMD and finally upped the core count on their CPUs. It’s too early to say how much of a difference it is in comparison to the previous generation without proper benchmarks and how it will compete against Ryzen 2 but as a PC Enthusiast it’s going to be great to see the competition between Intel and AMD in the coming years, that’s for sure.
The 8th Generation Coffee Lake Desktop CPUs will release on the 5th of October 2017.
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