On the day of the great solar eclipse across the US, Intel will show Coffee Lake, it’s 8th generation of Core series processors, to the world.
That’s right, on August 21, when the sun and moon will throw immense shade upon the US for but a few moments, Intel will throw its own shade at AMD Ryzen with its latest CPUs. This was no coincidence.
On August 21, Intel will livestream the festivities on both its own newsroom page as well as Facebook starting at 8am PT (11am ET, 5pm BT) or 1am AEST on August 22.
In the same breath, Intel let loose some key details regarding its plans for the big Coffee Lake reveal, namely that we’ll also see brand new PC designs based on the new processors as well as a sneak peek at new standalone devices using the new chips.
Finally, Intel teases that folks will be able to buy Coffee Lake chips in addition to devices housing them before the holiday shopping season hits – ahem, like Black Friday?
Sizing up the competition
Beyond that, all we know about Coffee Lake so far is that these chips will be produced using the same 14-nanometer fabrication process, the fourth time now consecutively.
Intel has also publicly claimed that these processors will be 15% to 30% faster than the previous generation despite using the same amount of transistors as before. That could be due to rumored quad-core versions of Core i3 chips and hexa-core makes of chips beyond that class in mainstream offerings.
Oh, and you'll likely need a new motherboard for these Coffee Lake chips.
As for what this means for AMD’s Ryzen, well, it would be smart for Intel to ramp up the core counts across its Coffee Lake lineup if only to maintain parity with its key rival. This is where we could see Intel wrangle hold again of the top spot in terms of power and efficiency in the low-end and mid-range ends of the CPU spectrum.
However, as we’ve seen with pricing of Ryzen versus that of Intel’s latest Kaby Lake chips, that facet of the ongoing battle is, as always, up in the air. Be sure to join us on August 21 for the latest news and our hot takes, as that Monday just got a major upgrade.
- How long until Coffee Lake makes it into the best laptops?
