coffee-lake – Tech Today w/ Ken May

What is Intel Coffee Lake?

Intel’s 8th-generation “Coffee Lake” CPUs are now on the market. These chips come with a modest bump in CPU frequency, but the big news is that Intel is finally adding 6-core processors to its mainstream i7 and i5 lines. More cores means these chips will perform better at tasks that benefit from multithreading, such as content creation and data processing, and the increase in frequency and cores will give a boost to gaming frame rates. Intel used to release chips on a “tick-tock” cycle that saw every release alternate either a new design, or a new manufacturing process – called a “node.” A new process node, like moving from 45nm to 22nm, means smaller transistors and a faster or more power-efficient chip. But manufacturing challenges made tick-tock falter a few years ago, and now new releases are much harder to predict. “Coffee Lake” is the fourth chip Intel has released at 14nm, and the third based on the “Skylake” design from 2015. New designs and nodes are coming, but we’ll probably have to wait until they arrive in 2018 to see a big jump in performance.

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What is Intel Coffee Lake?

Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8700K review: The best gaming CPU you can buy

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton) For those that game, there’s no better processor than Intel’s Coffee Lake Core i7-8700K. Where its predecessor, the Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K , offered little more than slightly higher clock speeds and a way to decode DRM-laden 4K video over 2015’s 6700K , the 8700K boosts performance with six cores, 12 threads, and a mighty 4.7GHz boost clock, the fastest out-of-the-box clock speed Intel has ever produced. The 8700K handles content creation admirably too, its high clock speed partly compensating for the two extra cores of AMD’s Ryzen 7 . But it’s not an outright smash. Much like Intel’s Skylake-X i9 processors, there are signs that the 8700K was rushed to combat a resurgent AMD, as well as to fill the gap created by the now delayed 10nm Cannon Lake architecture. Reaching such high clock speeds across six cores has dramatically increased power consumption, and made managing heat a headache. Overclocking isn’t for the faint hearted, or at least those without a substantial cooling setup. And, despite being based on an architecture that stretches back to Skylake , Coffee Lake requires a new motherboard, turning what might have been a compelling upgrade, even for Kaby Lake owners, into a far more considered purchase. The 8700K is undoubtedly a fine processor; those shopping for a mainstream system, particularly one with a top-of-the-line graphics card, should buy it. But, while more than stopgap solution, Coffee Lake merely paints over the cracks that emerged when Intel braved its way into a post-“tick-tock” world . It’s damage control, not an outright victory. Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8700K review: The best gaming CPU you can buy

Alleged Intel i7-8700K Coffee Lake benchmarks leak online

Enlarge Alleged benchmarks for Intel’s as yet unannounced Core i7-8700K have leaked online courtesy of a tech YouTuber and an unguarded HP Omen PC at DreamHack 2017. The i7-8700K—the rumoured flagship six-core, 12-thread processor of Intel’s upcoming eighth generation Coffee Lake desktop CPUs—was put through popular benchmarking program Cinebench R15, scoring a cool 1230 points in a multithreaded test. That’s a significant leap over the previous-generation Intel Core i7-7700K (4C/8T), which typically posts a score around 950 points. That score also puts the i7-8700K neck and neck with AMD’s 6C/12T Ryzen 1600X , which we scored at 1234 points, but behind AMD’s 8C/12T Ryzen 7 1700 with its score of 1422. Meanwhile, AMD’s flagship Ryzen 7 1800X is significantly faster with a score of 1616 points. YouTuber Karl Morin was also able to run a single-threaded benchmark, which shows the i7-8700K posting a score of 196. That would make it fastest single-threaded chip around, beating the pervious generation i7-7700K’s score of around 185 points, although it’s still far from a compelling improvement in instructions per clock. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alleged Intel i7-8700K Coffee Lake benchmarks leak online

Intel will unveil 8th-gen Core processors on August 21st

Intel’s 7th-generation Core processors still feel relatively young, but the company is already poised to talk about their successors. The chip designer has announced that it will premiere its 8th-generation Core CPUs on August 21st, complete with a livestream on Intel’s Facebook page . The company is unsurprisingly shy on technical details, but it promises previews of PCs built on 8th-gen chips as well as a demo from a VR creator. As it stands, there’s already some idea of what to expect. On the record, Intel has already acknowledged that the 8th-gen (aka Coffee Lake) won’t be a radical redesign: it’s still built on a 14-nanometer manufacturing process and shares a lot in common with its predecessors. However, both Intel’s early benchmarking tease and various leaks suggest there may be reasons to get excited. More than anything, the focus is on cramming in more cores at similar power levels. Both the Core i5 and Core i7 would move to six cores on the desktop, while you’d see four cores in the Core i3, Pentium and some low-power laptop chips. In essence, it should be a continuation of what Intel is doing with the Core i9 and X-series Core i7: it’s adding extra cores both a foil to AMD’s Ryzen processors (where core count is an advantage) and as an acknowledgment that there are diminishing returns from tweaking familiar architectures and processes. This gives it a big boost to performance in multitasking and highly multithreaded apps without having to reinvent the wheel. The real breakthrough should come with Cannonlake, which should move to a far more efficient (and likely faster) 10nm process. Via: AnandTech Source: Intel

Intel will release 8th-gen Coffee Lake chips this year—still at 14nm

Enlarge Intel’s eighth-generation Core CPUs, codenamed Coffee Lake, will launch in the second half of 2017—far earlier than the 2018 launch period suggested by supposed product roadmaps leaked last year. At its Investor Day event last week, Intel confirmed that its 8th-gen chips will once again be based on a 14nm process, much like Broadwell , Skylake , and Kaby Lake before it. The first Broadwell chips were released way back in 2014. Intel officially abandoned its previous “Tick-Tock” strategy—with each “tick” representing a die shrink and each “tock” representing a new microarchitecture—in early 2016, and instead promised a three-phase model of Process, Architecture, Optimization. But now, with Coffee Lake, it seems Intel might have abandoned that new model, too. Technically, Kaby Lake is the “Optimization” to the “Architecture” of Skylake and the “Process” of Broadwell, which makes the early launch of Coffee Lake on 14nm something of an anomaly. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel will release 8th-gen Coffee Lake chips this year—still at 14nm