Intel Announces 8th Gen Core CPUs: Claims 40% Boost Over Gen 7, More Cores

The embargo expired this morning for Intel's "8th Gen Core CPU" announcement. The initial CPUs being rolled out now are their laptop/ultrabook U series processors while the new desktop processors will come later in the year.

While the new CPUs are being advertised as an 8th Gen Core processor, these -U series CPUs are a Kaby Lake Refresh and not a new microarchitecture. In fact, the integrated graphics haven't seen any changes besides relabeling the "HD Graphics" to now be called "UHD Graphics", Intel shared in their press briefing. On the CPU side, Intel's Kaby Lake Refresh is at least bringing more CPU cores now that AMD is pressuring them with the higher core count Ryzen processors. With the higher core counts plus various other improvements made, Intel is advertising the 8th Gen Core CPUs as being up to 40% faster than 7th Gen Core CPUs.

The CPUs being announced today are the Core i5 8250U as a quad-core plus Hyper Threading CPU, the Core i5 8350U as another quad-core plus Hyper Threading but with higher clock frequencies, and then the Core i7 8550U/8650U as also quad-core plus HT models but with higher clock frequencies (up to 4GHz turbo) and having an 8MB L3 cache rather than 6MB on the i5 models.

Great to see Intel's U-series Core i5 processors now being quad-core with Hyper Threading, especially for these ultrabook/laptop processors. These Kaby Lake Refresh CPUs have a 15 Watt TDP.

At 8AM PDT today, Intel will have their formal launch event livestream here. It's all about Kaby Lake Refresh for mobile devices today while later in the year is when we should hear about Coffee Lake for the desktop.