Intel Coffee Lake 6-Core, 12-Thread Processor Vital Signs Detailed In CPU-Z

At some point between now and the end of the year, Intel will launch its eighth-generation Core processors, built around the Coffee Lake microarchitecture. It'll come at an interesting time, since it'll really be the first time in all of Core's lifetime that AMD has been truly competitive.

It'll also be interesting because it'll be yet another Core generation built on a 14nm process. Intel would love to shrink it down, we're sure, but it's just not ready enough to support a wide launch. Intel's first 10nm (Cannonlake) parts should come towards the end of this year or early next, but they won't initially impact Coffee Lake's lineup, as Intel's focus will be on dual-core parts.

Given the current landscape, it's easy to understand if you're not super-excited about Coffee Lake, given its lack of a die shrink, but, it does have one little trick up its sleeves: it'll offer six-core parts.

Ever since the launch of the Core i7-2600K in 2011, the top-end chips in Intel's mainstream lineup have offered 4 cores and 8 threads. The i7-8700K is going to change that up by offering 6 cores and 12 threads, and given the competition, we'd have to assume that it will carry the same pricing as the predecessor quad-cores.

Thanks to a new leak, we get a glimpse at what one of these six cores will bring to the table. Through a CPU-Z screenshot, we see that this engineering sample has a base clock speed of 3.5GHz, but Turbo will give that a boost when the going gets tough (the shot references 3.9GHz, but it might go higher). Whatever this part winds up being, it'll apparently carry an 80W TDP.

There's not too much else to glean from the screenshot, but it could give us the impression that the launch will come sooner than later. We might have AMD to thank for that.