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Intel Launches 8th-Gen Core Desktop Chips; Claims New Core i7-8700K is its Best Gaming Chip Ever

posted by takyon on Monday September 25 2017, @11:58PM   
from the yeah-but-we-want-risc-v dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

PCWorld:

Intel's new 8th-gen Core chips now include six cores on the high end, attacking one of AMD's Ryzen advantages.

[...] Orders for the Intel's new Core desktop chips will begin on Oct. 5, Anand Srivatsa, general manager of the desktop platform group at Intel, said. They will begin shipping later in the fourth quarter. Though Intel executives didn't use the term, the new chips have been referred to as part of the "Coffee Lake" family.

Of the six new desktop chips that Intel announced, the flagship offering is clearly the Core i7-8700K, which Srivatsa touted as its best gaming processor ever. The new Core i7-8700K will offer an additional 25 percent in frames per second running Microsoft's Gears of War 4, versus its 7th-gen Core i7-7700K—a 4-core, 8-thread part. Multitasking, though—such as gaming, streaming, and recording using the popular Player Unknown: Battlegrounds—will be a whopping 45 percent faster than a 7th-gen part, executives said.

Tom's Hardware:

Intel indicated that this 8th-generation part is built on what it calls a 14nm++ process. The company would not comment on the die size or transistor count at this time…

The company has added a few more knobs for the overclocking crowd to turn, as well. Turbo Boost 2.0 is still supported, but you now get per-core overclocking, a maximum memory ratio up to 8,400 MT/s, memory latency control, and PLM Trim controls. We've included a slide from Intel's press deck below. It lists some of the key specs and pricing. Notably, the high-end Core i7 part is $20 higher than initial Kaby Lake pricing; the Core i5 sits $15 higher. This move is likely designed to cover the additional costs of the silicon along with avoiding cannibalizing the existing Kaby Lake models. Cache sizes are higher and base clocks are lower, comparatively, but the single-core max frequencies are higher. TDP is also higher, presumably to support the higher core count.

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Original Submission

• LGA 1151 300-series LGA 1151 300-series (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:06AM (1 child)

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:06AM (#572891) Journal

  You can't just drop in a Coffee Lake 6-core on any LGA 1151 motherboard:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1151 [wikipedia.org]

  LGA 1151 will be the first Intel mainstream socket to support more than 4 cores, but the 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs cannot be used with an "old" LGA 1151 socket (on 100- and 200-Series chipsets). A revision to the socket has been made to support 6 cores total, but it will still support quad-core Coffee Lake processors as well.

  [...] The Z370 chipset and motherboards based on it will be released on the 6th of October, 2017. Other Z370 chipsets might be postponed till 2018.[31] Desktop Coffee Lake CPUs will not be compatible with the 100 (original Skylake) and 200 (Kaby Lake) series chipsets.[32] In addition, Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs may not be compatible with the 300 series chipsets.

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• Yeah. That's silly (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @01:56PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @01:56PM (#573103)

  Surely, it could have been engineered such that a 6-core chip in an "old" LGA 1151 socket would at least work as a 4-core chip, etc. Surely, it could have also been engineered to work in some kind of degraded mode, whereby the 2 "extra" cores can still be passed tasks by one of the other cores.

  Parent