For our review of the 8th-gen Core processors, we’ll be doing a series of reviews analyzing the applications of the processor. Our sample, the Core i7 8700K is a 6-core, 12-thread processor and is aimed at high-end mainstream builders, streamers and content creators. That said, our series of articles will breakdown in detail the performance of the Core i7 8700K versus its closest rivals in terms of core count and market position. For this review we’ll see raw CPU performance and in the upcoming articles we’ll cover gaming performance, streaming performance, overclocking and memory benefits as well as a few others that should shed more light in the value of the new processors.
Intel has always been on the dominant side of the market for a good part of the decade due in part to AMD’s lack of competitive offering but with the release of the Ryzen 7Â and the entire Ryzen MSDT family, Intel has been shaken if not completely rocked from its foundation with AMD’s resurgence. Intel has been criticized for lazily riding its tick-tock cycle which has now been stalled and we’re going to be seeing the 3rd 14nm offering from Intel with the 8th-gen Coffee Lake processors. The annual cycle of MSDT CPU releases with little improvements from Intel now ends with the release of the Intel 8th-gen family of desktop processors.
This is an unprecedented moment as Intel has never had three product generation available in a single year and with the announcement of the EOL for the Skylake family, the Coffee Lake will exist side-by-side with the relatively new Kaby Lake processors. This has put Intel under fire for releasing in such an abrupt fashion, basically announcing the imminent EOL of the Kaby Lake family.
It makes sense for Intel to go down that route though as they have pretty much pre-planned their new processors years in advance and this is just a contingency plan for them in ever such a case that a competitor threaten their market position. With AMD offering core count and value, Intel had to retaliate in a similar fashion. Enter the Intel 8th-gen desktop processors.
Intel 8th-gen processors (codenamed Coffee Lake) are the first mainstream desktop (MSDT) products from Intel to feature 6-core, 12-threads and also welcomes the mainstream debut of the quad-core Core i3 SKUs. This means that going forward, quad-core processors may now be the entry-level mainstream core count with AMD also going such a route with their Ryzen 3 SKUs. At launch, we have the following processors announced:
| Processor | Base Clock | Turbo Frequency | Core/Thread | Unlocked | Intel Smart Cache | Memory Support | Intel Optane Support | Price |
| i7-8700K | 3.7 | 4.7 | 6/12 | x | 12 | Dual-Channel DDR4-2666 | x | $359 |
| i7-8700 | 3.2 | 4.6 | 6/12 | 12 | Dual-Channel DDR4-2666 | x | $303 | |
| i5-8600K | 3.6 | 4.3 | 6/6 | x | 9 | Dual-Channel DDR4-2666 | x | $257 |
| i5-8400 | 2.8 | 4 | 6/6 | 9 | Dual-Channel DDR4-2666 | x | $182 | |
| i3-8350K | 4 | N/A | 4/4 | x | 6 | Dual-Channel DDR4-2400 | x | $168 |
| i3-8100 | 3.6 | N/A | 4/4 | 6 | Dual-Channel DDR4-2400 | x | $117 |
Leading the pack is the 6-core Hyperthreaded (12-threads) Core i7-8700K. The first non-HEDT targeted 6-core from Intel. This is joined by the i5-8600K, another 6-core model which sees the debut of 6-core Core i5 SKUs. We also see another unlocked Core i3 with the i3-8350K, a quad-core product along with the entry level i3-8100.
All products will support Intel Optane memory and aside from the Core i3 variants that support DDR4-2400, all SKUs will have native support for dual-channel DDR4-2666.
A New Generation of Motherboards
The new 8th-Gen Intel processors will be accompanied by a new motherboard chipset. Despite using an LGA1151 socket dubbed LGA1151v2, it uses a different pin configuration than Skylake and Kaby Lake-compatible boards prior (Intel 100 and 200 respectively) making them hardware incompatible with each other e.g. Kaby Lake will not work on Z370 boards and Coffee Lake processors will not work on Z270 or lower boards. That said, Intel has introduced some new features into the chipset which we’ll in detail in our motherboard reviews.
As you can see from the platform diagram above, Intel isn’t introducing much features with its Z370 chipset but motherboard vendors are free to be creative with the available I/O of the Z370 or add in their own via 3rd-party chips. For now, at the minimum we have multiplier overclocking support on K-unlocked processors on the Z370 as well as native USB3.1 Gen1 support, PCIe Gen3, Intel LAN, and Thunderbolt3 (only if implemented by board vendor.)
