With the return of AMD to the big leagues with its Ryzen processors, Intel needs to accelerate the arrival of new Intel Core ‘Coffee Lake’ processors to remain in its dominant position.
AMD has 8-core Ryzen processors that work really well at a competitive price, like the Ryzen 7 2700X, which is competing with the Intel Core i7 8700K, which has two fewer cores.
Intel doesn’t want to continue to tolerate its competitors offering more cores than its Intel Core, so it is preparing a new 8-core, 16-wire processor based on the Coffee Lake architecture, which first appeared on SiSoft Sandra.
This chip is the blue company’s hope to outperform the new Ryzen 7 2700X with the same number of cores/wires and higher clock speeds. These first CPUs are beginning to appear on benchmarking websites such as the SiSoftware database, where an 8-core, 16-thread processor with the name “Kaby lake Client Platform” has made its appearance, which appears to be a test platform for Intel processors.
The processor has a clock speed of 2.6 GHz, which suggests that the database is still not correctly identifying it. Clock speeds are expected to increase as Intel prepares its next 8-core CPU for the official launch. The cache sizes in the SiSoftware database also match what we can expect from an 8-core processor in the Coffee Lake series, with 2 MB of L3 cache per processor core (16 MB). Intel’s use of a Kaby lake Client Platform also suggests that the company will continue to use an LGA 1151 CPU socket.
We will most likely see this processor in stores in the second half of this year.