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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.
Given that just yesterday, Intel announced a product release for September 25th isn't it a little early to talk about what comes after? We haven't had the chance to see how their current compares to AMD's offering which isn't due until later this month.
Guess Intel is afraid of something. Maybe AMD has given them some much needed competition.
Eighth-gen Coffee Lake chips will be built using a revised version of Intel's 14nm process technology for an unprecedented fourth time
Intel is switching to complete 14nm FinFET here. The reason is that some of the competing fabs that stayed with FinFET are now manufacturing 10nm FinFET while Intel spent 3 years now trying to make 10nm Tri-Gates economical and have failed miserably. The Tri-Gate lithography is just too expensive: Too many steps, and the yields too poor.
When Intel beat the world to 14nm it didnt matter so much that Tri-Gate's were not as economical as FinFET because Intel beat the world there by a big margin and didnt have to compete. Now they not only have to complete against 14nm FinFET but also 10nm FinFET and it wont be long until 7nm FinFET is in production by at least the companies that skipped 10nm on purpose (they are not the same fab companies as the ones producing 10nm FinFET's today)
Companies that beat Intel to 10nm (so far):
Samsung, TSMC
Companies that absolutely will beat Intel to 7nm:
Global Foundries, TSMC, Samsung. I predict that this is the order that it will happen in. GloFlo skipped 10nm on purpose to be the first to 7nm.
"His name was James Damore."
Has there ever been a new generation where the promised increase wasn't "up to 30%" ? Because I've never heard any other number used.
Also, am I the only one that finds Intel a wee bit histrionic this last month or so? They've been throwing everything they can (including the chairs) at the wall, but nothing seems to stick so far.