For the last few months, Intel and AMD have been playing a bit of one-sided chicken. With AMD's Ryzen and Epyc initial launch cycles nearly complete, we've seen the smaller CPU company aggressively take the fight to Intel in CPU pricing. And the market has responded -- the Ryzen 7 1700 is now the second-best selling CPU on Amazon. Six of the top 15 CPUs on Amazon(Opens in a new window) are made by AMD (with 5 Ryzen SKUs) and eight of the top 20. Now there are rumors that Intel will respond to AMD's moves in the consumer space as well, possibly with new Core i7 and i5 offerings that add six-core CPUs to Intel's desktop lines.
There's already some precedent for this. Intel's Core X series and the recent Skylake-SP launch are both meant to reposition Santa Clara against its rival, particularly the Core i7-7820X, which has a list price of $589 to $599. Be advised, if you intend to overclock, you need to read about the problems overclockers have encountered with the X299 chipset. But when running at stock speed, you can already buy an eight-core Intel CPU for $600. While that's $100 more than what you'll pay for a Ryzen 7 1800X, it's a heck of a lot cheaper than the Broadwell-based Core i7-6900K, which was an $1,100 chip.
Intel slashed prices on certain competitive SKUs within the new Core X series to bring them more in line with Ryzen, so it's not surprising to hear that the company might fight back on the core count front. This news, according(Opens in a new window) to CanardPC, claims Intel will introduce two six-core models with its new Coffee Lake CPUs. The Core i7-8700K will have six cores, 12 threads, 12MB of L3, a 95W TDP, and a base clock of 3.7GHz. Meanwhile, the Core i5 8600K would be a six-core chip at 3.6GHz with no Hyper-Threading, 9MB of L3, and the same 95W TDP.
We've seen Coffee Lake mentioned before on previous leaked roadmaps, but not with any specific SKU information.
This would be an interesting move for Intel and the first time core counts on mainstream consumer chips have changed in nearly a decade. So far, Intel has enabled Hyper-Threading on its Celeron line, but it hasn't actually added new CPU cores to its desktop products. The Core i3 is dual-core + HT, the Core i5 is quad-core with no HT, and the Core i7 is a quad-core with HT. We won't know how well Ryzen is selling until AMD releases its Q2 results later this month, but it certainly seems to have shaken up the market in servers and desktops. Mobile rollouts are supposed to follow later this year; AMD has already demoed some gaming systems at major events.
If Intel does roll six cores without HT into the Core i5 family, it's hard to see how the Core i3 would remain a dual-core + HT part. What seems more likely is that the Core i3 would either split, with some models offering quad cores and some offering dual+HT, or that Intel would simply use the Core i3 brand to take Core i5's place, and leave the dual-core + HT option to the Pentium line. Obviously we'll have to wait and see how the particulars shake out.
