Intel Teases 40% Performance Boost With 8th-Gen Core i5, i7

Intel unveiled a new generation of Core i5 and Core i7 processors on Monday, promising a forty per centum performance improvement over its current crop of CPUs.

The four new chips stand for the primeval ancestry of the Core family'southward eighth generation, and include two new Core i5 SKUs and two new Cadre i7 SKUs. They're U-series chips, which means they're destined for ultraportables and two-in-one convertible laptops or tablets. Each one has four cores and eight threads, with the height-of-the line Cadre i7-8650U achieving a maximum clock speed of 4.2GHz.

At the lower end is the Core i5-8250U, which runs at a maximum of 3.4GHz. All of the new chips avowal the usual gaggle of Intel performance and security features, including Turbo Heave 2.0, Hyper-Threading, smart caches, and AES encryption. They also support Optane memory, a new technology Intel rolled out before this year to enable systems with conventional spinning hard disks rival the speed of PCs with solid land drives.

The chips are available at present to OEMs and arrangement builders, and major computer makers like Dell and Lenovo volition likely denote new PCs with 8th-generation chips in fourth dimension for the holiday shopping season.

Missing from the chips is a new microarchitecture, the basic design of a microprocessor that defines everything from its caching capabilities to the construction of its transistors. The initial four fries are based on the existing Kaby Lake chip design, which uses a 14nm product process that is also found in the electric current sixth-generation Cadre lineup. A new 10nm architecture nicknamed Coffee Lake is in the works, although Intel has offered few details on its capabilities. Final week, the company also teased yet some other architecture, called Water ice Lake, which volition apply a second-generation 10nm production process that Intel refers to equally 10nm+.

Also coming this fall are 8th-generation Core i3 chips, besides as Core i5 and i7 SKUs in the Y-series (for fanless PCs), H-series (for gaming laptops and mobile workstations), and S-series (for desktops) families.

Intel, ever tight-lipped well-nigh the specific pattern and manufacturing improvements that go into successive chip generations, didn't elaborate on how the eighth-generation Core lineup achieves its xl percent performance gains. In a press conference last week, however, the company did say that 25 per centum of the performance heave comes from calculation two more cores (seventh-generation Core i5 and i7 U-serial chips have but two cores), while design and manufacturing improvements are responsible for the remaining xv percent.

Intel's Cadre serial has long been the preferred option for powering consumer PCs, only the visitor is now facing increasing competition from AMD, which this year introduced its new Ryzen CPU lineup that rivals the Core'southward capabilities at comparable or slightly cheaper prices.