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Intel Will Bring Additional Facilities Online to Improve Coffee Lake Shipments

Intel is bringing new facilities online to improve Coffee Lake CPU production and bring prices down. While it's nothing compared with GPUs, the 8th Gen chips are a bit overheated.
By Joel Hruska
Intel-Core-i7-8700K

Intel's Coffee Lake launched six weeks ago, but finding the chips online has sometimes been challenging. Prices have consistently hovered above MSRP and availability hasn't been 100 percent. That's unfortunate -- the Core i7-8700K is the best mainstream desktop CPU available in-market today -- and it's a situation Intel is moving to address.

Intel is moving to test the 8th generation Coffee Lake CPUs at Chengdu, China. The facility is certified under Intel's Copy Exactly program and should have no problem fielding additional cores into the market. The fact that Intel needs to bring up a new facility, however, does suggest that yields on its new 14nm++ might still be a bit dicey at the top of the product stack.

Alternatively, it's possible that Intel has simply set a very difficult target for the CPU. Even if overall 14nm++ yields are strong, hitting the targets Intel set for power consumption and frequency might be quite difficult. While it's fast, the Core i7-8700K also runs pretty hot. In a PDF advising customers of the change, Intel writes(Opens in a new window):
In order to ensure a continuous supply of the Intel Core i5-8400 Processor, Intel Core i5-8600K Processor, Intel Core i7-8700 Processor, and Intel Core i7-8700K Processor listed in the 'Products Affected' Table below, Intel will be adding an additional manufacturing site for Assembly/Test. The new site is located in Chengdu, China. The new manufacturing site has been certified equivalent (form, fit, function, and reliability) for the affected products and technologies of this change.
Intel-Shipments

This change shouldn't impact consumers in the slightest, but it could mean a higher number of CPUs in the field, at closer to expected prices. As of this writing, AMD is still offering vastly improved competition against Intel -- even with the 8700K launched, AMD has six spots in the Top 15 at Amazon and 8 spots in the Top 20. Prices on the Core i7-8700K are also markedly higher than MSRP, with the chip selling for $414 as opposed to $379. Luckily for Intel, AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X is still selling around $439 -- an AMD price cut to bring Ryzen performance back into line with the 8th-generation Coffee Lake family could've given AMD a leg up on the competition, but Sunnyvale appears satisfied with its prices and shipments so far.

With Raven Ridge only debuting on the laptop market this year, the rest of 2017 should be fairly quiet before the inevitable yearly launch cycle begins again. Thus far, 2018 is shaping up to be much quieter than 2017 was, for both companies -- AMD's Ryzen 2 won't arrive until 7nm in 2019 at the earliest, and Intel's Cannon Lake isn't a major desktop refresh.

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