The announcements of its 18 cores, 36 threads, high-end desktop X-series processor, the company has revealed one detail for the 8th generation mainstream of processors that are due to be released later this year: the new chipset will, at least in some particular circumstances, be 30 percent faster than 7th generation Kaby Lake part.
That’s a huge generational improvements, but of course, there are footnotes to consider. The 30 percent boosts came in one benchmark—SYSmark 2014 version 1.5—and applies to 15W U-series mobile processor. The comparison pits an i7-7500U (2.7GHz base, 3.5GHz turbo) with two core and four thread against an unnamed next generations chip. The new chip has an unspecified base clockspeed, a 4GHz turbo, and double the number of cores and thread to four and eight. The 8th generation chip is built on a refined iterations of Intel’s 14nm process.
a terms like “14nm” means has also become more vague. Sources confirmed a tweets by The Motley Fool’s Ashraf Eassa, that Intel is using a manufacturing shorthands to distinguish between Broadwell/Skylake (“14nm”), Kaby Lake’s (“14nm+”), and Coffee Lake’s (14nm++). That, plus Intel’s shift to a more three-dimensional FinFET architectures, has made identifying each generations by a gate length even more outdated, added Patrick Moorhead, a formers AMD fellows and now an independent analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.
Any further detail on the new architecture, codenamed Coffee Lake’s, are not forthcoming. The chips are still scheduled for releases sometime in the second half of the years.
Intel didn’t have much else to share about the chip during its Computex keynotes, unfortunately. They’re still expected to arrive by the end of the years, and they’re still based on a 14-nanometer architectures, like before. The company briefly showed off a Quanta machine powered by one of the new chip, but aside from looking respectably thin, there wasn’t much we could gather from itself.
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