Intel confirms 8th-Gen Coffee Lake chips for 2017, Up to 30% Faster than Kaby Lake

Intel today unveiled its high-end desktop Core X-series processors, including a new Core i9 Extreme Edition with 18 cores. Alongside the big news, the company has revealed one detail for its 8th generation mainstream processors, code named Coffee Lake: the new chips are performing even better than expected.

Chipzilla originally announced its plans to launch 8th-gen Core processors back in February. At the time, Intel said the new chips would launch in the second half of this year, offering at least 15% increase in performance over their predecessors.

But as it turns out, the new Coffee Lake processors are performing 30% faster than 7th-gen Kaby Lake parts. Of course, there are caveats to consider: the increase in performance came in one benchmark, that is SYSmark 2014 version 1.5, and applies to 15W U-series mobile processors.

The comparison pits a dual-core i7-7500U with clock speeds of 2.7GHz base and up to 3.5GHz Turbo Boost against an unreleased Core i7 chip. The next-gen chip features four cores and eight threads with an unspecified base clock speed and Turbo Boost up to 4GHz.

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The 8th-gen chips will be based on the same architecture as the Kaby Lake, but would use a refined iteration of Intel’s 14nm process. The Coffee Lake series processor will see the introduction of the company’s first mainstream 6-core SKUs.

The desktop parts, code named Coffee Lake-S, will be offered in two configurations: 4+2 (Quad Core + GT2 Graphics) and 6+2 (Hexa Core + GT2 Graphics). The 6-core CFL chips are expected to deliver a big jump in multi-core performance for Intel’s mainstream desktop lineup, as the company has been selling quad-core processors into this market for years.

Intel’s 8th-gen Coffee Lake chips remain on track for launch in the second half of the year.