Intel's Just Launched 8th Gen 'Coffee Lake' Processors Bring the Heat To AMD's Ryzen

bigwophh writes: The upheaval of the high-end desktop processor segment continues today with the official release of Intel's latest Coffee Lake-based 8th Generation Core processors. The flagship in the new lineup is the Core i7-8700K. It is a 6C/12T beast, with a base clock of 3.7GHz, a boost clock of 4.7GHz, and 12MB of Intel Smart Cache. The Core i5-8400 features the same physical die, but has only 9MB of Smart Cache, no Hyper-Threading, and base and boost clocks of 2.8GHz and 4GHz, respectively. The entire line-up features more cores, support for faster memory speeds, and leverages a fresh platform that's been tweaked for more robust power delivery and, ultimately, more performance. The Core i7-8700K proved to be an excellent performer, besting every other processor in single-threaded workloads and competing favorably with 8C/16T Ryzen 7 processors. The affordably-priced 6-core Core i5-8400 even managed to pull ahead of the quad-core Core i7-7700K in some tests. Overall, performance is strong, especially for games, and the processors seem to be solid values in their segment.

Comments

Re:I'm a bit of an AMD Fanboi, but...

[flatulus]

Intel's schedule for Coffee Lake may have been moved up a bit due to Ryzen, but this is not a "rabbit out of a hat" move for Intel.

See here http://marketrealist.com/2017/... which says "There are rumors that Intel may launch its HEDT (high-end desktop) processors and chipsets and its Coffee Lake microarchitecture a few months earlier than anticipated in response to AMD’s Ryzen 5 and 7 processors. "

That web page is dated April 28, 2017.
Here's another article: https://www.pcworld.com/articl... which shows Coffee Lake in 2H17. This article is dated Feb 13, 2017.

So Intel is executing according to plan since first of this calendar year.

Re:More more more!

[thegreatbob]

Currently running crusty old X79 stuff, a PCIe -> M.2 adapter, running a Samsung 960 Evo 250GB. Pretty sure NVMe just implies a standardized controller interface stitched to PCIe; I've been under the impression that software support is the main issue with it, as it's basically just another PCIe card as far as the hardware is concerned. I see it suggested on the internet (probably old forum posts) that X79 stuff should not be able to use it as a boot device, but my system begs to differ.

The piddly PCIe provisions are a shame though... no improvement (in lane count) whatsoever since they pulled the controllers onto the CPU die (LGA1156, Nehlaem). Note that the addition of each lane requires no less than two additional pins on the socket, so they'd have to re-purpose some pins to do it, and there aren't really a lot to spare. I know there were a fair number (20+) on the 1155 that weren't marked RSVD or anything else, but I'm having some difficult finding data on 1151. From the images I have found, it appears that practically every pin is connected to something, and fewer than 20 RSVD pins remain at all.

Site I'm referencing

It looks like they ate about a dozen RSVD pins for more power...

Perhaps the bigger nuisance is that Coffee Lake breaks compatibility with the 100/200 series chipset motherboards.