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Intel's 8th-Gen 'Coffee Lake' Core CPUs Will Be Revealed During the Great American Eclipse (pcworld.com)
Brad Chacos, writing for PCWorld: Intel's response to AMD's disruptive Ryzen processors is soon to get its time in the sun. Well, sort of. On Tuesday, Intel announced plans to livestream the launch of its 8th-generation "Coffee Lake" processors on August 21 -- the same day that the great American solar eclipse casts its shadow across the United States. Intel's throwing shade. Eighth-gen Coffee Lake chips will be built using a revised version of Intel's 14nm process technology for an unprecedented fourth time, following in the footsteps of Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake architectures. You'll probably also need a new motherboard to use them. But most notably, Intel claims 8th-gen Core chips will be up to 30 percent faster than today's Kaby Lake processors in some applications. Intel chips haven't seen a performance leap like that in years. Beyond that, little is officially known about Coffee Lake, though the churning internet rumor mill thinks that Intel will up the core counts this time around to combat the threat of Ryzen.
Just to clarify, 10nm refers to the "process" and not the actual pitch of any of the resulting elements. Each fab implements it differently which results in different densities for the same "process". For example, the TSMC 10nm process has a gate pitch of 66nm and and interconnect of 44nm while Samsung's 68/51 respectively... the end result being that TSMC 10nm chips are denser than Samsung. Intel's is supposed to be 54/36 which is actually the same pitch as Samsung's proposed 8nm process and slightly smaller than TSMC's and Global Foundaries proposed 7nm processes (54/40 and 56/40). Intel's numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt, Samsung and TSMC both initially fudged their 10nm process pitches and Intel may be doing the same. However, the process size is slowly becoming a marketing gimmick.