Intel Coffee Lake release date, news and features

Fifth time’s the charm. At least that seems to be Intel’s contention with its upcoming fifth round of chips to be based on the 14nm manufacturing node.

After finally releasing the 7th generation, or Kaby Lake, Core processors unto the world late last year, the Santa Clara chipmaker tweeted that its 8th generation chips would harbor performance 15% better than their predecessors. Yet, on August 21, the company simply unveiled Kaby Lake Refresh, making Coffee Lake’s future dubious by effect.

Since then, Intel has clarified that its family of 8th generation processors will span a trio of architectures including Kaby Lake, Kaby Lake Refresh, Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake. In a statement reissued by Tom’s Hardware, Intel said that in combining these three architectures into a single generation, the company had to ‘re-imagine’ what ‘generation’ means.

Despite the confusion surrounding it, Coffee Lake appears to still be on track for a release some time in the second half of 2017, contrary to what some rumors would suggest.

Cut to the chase

What is it? One of Intel's 8th-generation 14nm CPU architectures
When is it out? The second half of 2017, possibly 2018
What will it cost? Likely as much as current Kaby Lake CPUs

Intel Coffee Lake release date

After stating back in February that Coffee Lake would surface in the latter half of the year, Intel seemed to reassure us of this claim at Computex 2017 held in Taipei, Taiwan.

Since then, the Santa Clara chipmaker came out and teased an August 21 livestream reveal of its 8th-generation processors, which turned out to be a refresh of its 7th-generation processors for Ultrabooks and laptops, called Kaby Lake R.

For now, it’s unclear when we’ll see Intel’s desktop-class Coffee Lake processors, though we do know that the company’s 10nm die shrink, code-named ‘Cannonlake’ is set for 2018 at the earliest, and the aforementioned, 10nm+ Ice Lake won’t be here until at least 2019.

Intel Coffee Lake price

Arguably the most elusive aspect of Coffee Lake is its pricing. For now, we don’t have much to base our speculation on aside from current market trends sanctioned by AMD Ryzen and Intel Kaby Lake.

Prior to Intel’s Computex showing, some outlets, such as PCWorld, were suggesting that Intel Coffee Lake processors would be implemented in “mainstream” laptops and PCs. Meanwhile, Cannonlake would be reserved exclusively for luxury devices such as Ultrabooks, which typically see lower sales margins overall.

That’s no longer the case seeing as Cannonlake was pushed back to 2018, meaning we’ll probably see Coffee Lake processors from every end of the computing spectrum. Depending on a few factors (e.g. brand, modifier, product line), there will undoubtedly be a broad selection of Intel Coffee Lake processors spanning a gamut of different budgets.

Buying an Intel Kaby Lake processor on its own will, as of this writing, set you back anywhere from $42 (£39, AU$66) to $350 (£415, AU$469) while Ryzen processors range from $168 (£158, AU$245) to $499 (£500, around AU$650).

Intel Coffee Lake specs

As spotted by Wccftech, many of the Coffee Lake processors of the Intel Core variety have already been leaked by the Sisoftware database, albeit at a preliminary level. As you can tell from these leaks, there are a lot of improvements in tow, mainly in the amount of cores and threads per core that we’re seeing in early Coffee Lake leaks.

What’s more, some laptop makers are brandishing notebooks powered by 8th generation U series processors. HP, for example, has announced a new family of ProBook computers donning up to an Intel Core i7-8550U. However, as it’s been confirmed, this is not a Coffee Lake processor, but instead a Kaby Lake R chip.

Still, we can’t tell how much will change given the marked upgrades in Intel’s marketing rhetoric. Although, as we stated earlier, Intel dubbed Coffee Lake’s performance 15% greater than that of Kaby Lake, the company has since gone on to say that its 8th-gen processors are more than 30% more powerful than those which preceded it.

That number derives from Intel’s own SYSmark 2014 v1.5 benchmark testing on Windows 10 where a Coffee Lake-based Core i7 quad-core CPU with a boost clock of 4GHz was pitted against the current-gen Core i7-7500U dual-core processor whose base/boost clock speeds are rated at 2.7GHz/3.5GHz, respectively.

It should be noted that whatever chip was being used in this isolated scenario is – like the Intel Core i7-7500U – a mobile, 15-watt processor that could, theoretically, be used in future iterations of the MacBook Pro or the best-in-class Dell XPS 13.

Finally, we've been hearing that Coffee Lake will demand a new motherboard, although a version of the LGA 1151 socket will still be in place. This suspicion was later confirmed by a collection of leaked box shots signifying the need for an “Intel 300 series chipset-based motherboard.”

Though we now know more than ever about Intel’s forthcoming 8th-generation Coffee Lake CPUs, there’s still a ton of news to come. Per usual, we encourage you return to this page periodically for in-depth coverage of the latest Intel Coffee Lake rumors and reveals.