1. Home >
  2. Computing

Intel's 2018 Roadmap Shows New High-End Cascade Lake-X Debuting Next Year

Intel's 2018 roadmaps show a new Cascade-X high-end CPU and a Gemini Lake Atom improvement that's more than just a process shift. Meanwhile, Coffee Lake debuts across the product spectrum.
By Joel Hruska
543318-intel-core-i9-x-series

2017 has been a banner year for CPU launches. AMD's Ryzen debut in March kicked off its own aggressive hardware ramp, with the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 families following in the spring and summer, and Raven Ridge debuting in the last few weeks. Intel's Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X launched in June, with Skylake-X offering faster performance and higher core counts for the same price than Intel had previously shipped. AMD's Threadripper debuted in August with 16 cores at the same price as a 10-core Intel CPU (and a significant performance advantage), and Intel's 18-core Skylake-X Core i9-7980XE retook the performance crown (though not the price/performance ratio) in September. Finally, the Core i7-8700K launched in October and won our top-end CPU recommendation, though the Ryzen 7 1800X is still quite competitive in well-threaded workstation workloads.

After such a strong year, people are understandably curious about what 2018 will hold for Intel and AMD. We know AMD is likely to debut a 12nm variant of Ryzen (Ryzen+), but no details on clocks or details has yet been released about that CPU family. Our money is on fairly modest changes, mostly related to GlobalFoundries improved 14nm process, which they're marketing as a 12nm node. Intel has released a new roadmap for its own hardware, however, shown below:

Intel roadmap

Intel's new Cascade Lake-X family is rumored to be based on Intel's 14nm++ architecture, which would offer a modest improvement to speeds or thermals. We wouldn't expect these gains to be significant in all cases -- while the chips can undoubtedly clock up a bit from where they are, it's far more difficult to increase the all-core boost clock on an 18-core CPU than on a quad-core or six-core chip. This chart also implies that Kaby Lake-X is going away after Cascade Lake, which honestly isn't surprising. Kaby Lake-X felt like an afterthought, something Intel tacked on to its X299 platform with a significant number of caveats, like only having half its RAM slots available when using a Kaby Lake-X CPU. Once the Core i7-8700K came out, KBL-X didn't make any sense.

Coffee Lake will continue to drive Intel's mainstream throughout all of 2018, with new six, four, and dual-core CPUs rounding out the product family. We've seen rumors of new chipsets, and the use of the generic "300-series" chipset as opposed to Z370 supports that rumor, but there's no word yet on whether these will be more budget offerings (which is what we expect) or if Intel will launch something higher-end. Atom CPUs are transitioning from Apollo Lake to Gemini Lake, and it looks like Gemini Lake breaks from Intel's previous tradition, in that it's neither a process shrink (which is what we'd expect under the old tick-tock model) nor simply a clock optimization/increase (which is what we'd expect under PAO).

Gemini-Lake-Block-Diagram

Gemini Lake, according to an analysis of the Linux patches added to support it(Opens in a new window), has a four-wide pipeline instead of three-wide, supports native HDMI 2.0, VP9 hardware decoding, DisplayPort 1.2a (which includes support for FreeSync technology), and a 10 to 15 percent overall performance uplift within the same power envelope. It may even contain an integrated 802.11ac modem, in a major first for an Intel SoC. Collectively, these are a fair number of improvements to Intel's budget processor, and they suggest Intel's Atom family will see a fair performance improvement in 2018.

Ultimately, we're not surprised to see CPU roadmaps without huge changes for next year. Intel and AMD have both introduced some significant new products in 2017, and the CPU market moves slower than it used to thanks to significant headwinds in chip design and process technology.

Tagged In

X300 Linux X299 Gemini Lake Intel

More from Computing

Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of use(Opens in a new window) and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.
Thanks for Signing Up