Intel’s eighth-gen CPUs will be more powerful than we thought

Since then, portable computing specialist Liliputing has reported on Coffee Lake laptops from Acer, Asus, and HP, while Intel’s official price list details wholesale rates and base specifications for the as-yet unannounced laptop-centric low-power Core i5 and Core i7 U-family ranges.

On the other hand, it is also hard not to attribute Intel’s new approach of introducing forthcoming Core chips to the more aggressive strategy AMD has taken in the past few months.

The eighth-generation parts announced today are using an architecture codenamed “Kaby Lake”, while the desktop processors due out in the fall will use one called “Coffee Lake” with slight changes.

Intel said it expects PC running the new processors to be available as soon as next month, with more than 145 designs already in development.

Intel has revealed that they plan to launch both an 8th generation Cannon Lake and 9th generation Ice Lake processor in the near future.

Chiphell informs that the 8th gen i7 CPUs will feature 6 cores and 12 threads.

Intel’s four new notebook processors join its U-series line, which is meant for thin-and-light devices (ultrabooks, notebook/tablet convertibles, etc.) requiring a relatively high level of performance.

This new mobile family sets the bar for outstanding performance, including a boost of up to 40 percent gen over gen1, and that jumps to 2×2 if you compare it with a 5-year-old machine. It has achieved the performance gains principally by adding more compute cores to the chips – in some cases as many as eight. Whereas last year’s seventh-generation CPUs were focused on improving 4K performance, the upcoming offerings will feature far more raw performance. This is the basis for Intel’s claim of a 40% productivity increase with the very important caveat of doing so in the same power envelope. Intel seems to be learning some marketing tricks from GPU makers and that is not a good thing. So, this new generation Intel processors would offer the best of speed which you might have never experienced before on any other systems.

That’s a leap in performance that arguably happens only once in a decade, Intel said. Almost 2x performance boost? The company is promoting the processors not only to business users but also to consumers and content creators, noting that users can play 4K UHD videos on their laptops for up to 10 hours and can edit action footage 14.7 times faster than on Kaby Lake chips.