In early August we shared the first leaked technical details about the Core i7-8700K and Core i7-8700, both under the Coffee Lake architecture. Santa Clara's plan is none other than to place itself at the same level as AMD, offering a similar number of cores and threads, combined with the superior IPC of its silicon. The time for rumors is over, and Intel not only confirmed the Core i7, but also did the same with the Core i5 and Core i3, which now will deliver six and four real cores respectively.
There is still a lot of ground to cover in the processor market. Ryzen chips kicked the board into orbit, and have earned the loyalty of their users purely with cores. Another critical detail is that the AM4 platform will be supported until the year 2020, therefore, the upgrade possibilities are very solid there. Now, what was Intel's response? In reality, its first efforts were aimed at containing the advance of Threadripper, and the general opinion is that they were a failure, since AMD offers 80 percent of the performance at half the price. Now it's the turn of the "mainstream" models, reinforced with the new Coffee Lake architecture.
The new lineup
The announcement includes six different models. Two of them are already known, the Core i7-8700K and Core i7-8700, but today we add the Core i5-8600K, Core i5-8400, Core i3-8350K and Core i3-8100. As we had anticipated, the Core i3 join the club of quad-core, with frequencies of 3.6 GHz for the i3-8100, and a not-to-be-sneered-at 4.0 GHz for the i3-8350K, which also supports overclocking. Similarly, the new Core i5 will be 6C/6T, with 2.8/4.0 GHz on the Core i5-8400, and 3.6/4.3 GHz on the i5-8600K. TDPs are divided into 65 or 95 watts, with the exception of the 8350K which reports 91 W.
Chipset, pricing, and availability
If there is a black spot on the record of the Coffee Lake processors, it is that they will demand a new motherboard based on the Z370 chipset, despite keeping the same socket. The 100 and 200 series chipsets are not compatible with this silicon (the extra cores require optimizations in power distribution), although something tells me we will see one or two experiments in this regard. Prices? 117 and 168 dollars for the i3, 182 and 257 dollars for the i5, and 303 or 359 dollars if we look for an i7. Available from October 5.
