Intel Coffee Lake Processors Arrive 2H'17

Intel moved away from its "Tick-Tock" processor model because it's getting really hard to produce high yields of chips now that we are moving to a 10nm process. Broadwell chips were the last "tick" and its successor Skylake was the last "tock." Both were 14nm chips, and instead of then moving to 10nm, Intel planned two further refinements to the 14nm process.

The first of those refinements is already available under the name Kaby Lake (7th generation). You may remember the Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake processor managed an overclock to 7GHz recently. Kaby Lake also promised a 15 percent performance gain over Skylake.

In a tweet yesterday, Intel confirmed the second refinement, code named Coffee Lake (8th generation), is set to arrive in the 2nd half of 2017. It also claims to offer a 15 percent performance gain, but over Kaby Lake, which begs the question: why buy Kaby Lake when Coffee Lake is coming?

A product roadmap leaked last September and suggested Coffee Lake chips wouldn't arrive until February 2018. It could be the roadmap wasn't real, or Intel may be releasing Coffee Lake earlier as it sees the threat posed by AMD's Ryzen processors, which are due to release in March (complete with support for Windows 7). With Kaby Lake still being so new on the market, the latter reason seems more likely to me.

As MSPowerUser points out, there's four variants of Coffee Lake processors planned: Coffee Lake-U, Coffee Lake-X, Coffee Lake-S, Coffee Lake-H. And it looks as though we'll get the high-end Core i7 chips first, in either 4-core or even 6-core options complete with GT2 integrated graphics.

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If you are looking to purchase a new desktop PC or a laptop later this year, then Coffee Lake looks set to be an option now, where as before Kaby Lake was the clear choice for 2017.