INTEL UNVEILS 8TH GENERATION CORE CPUS, KABY LAKE-R

Intel has officially launched its 8th generation of Core processors. These new chips are a refresh of the previous 7th generation Kaby Lake units and have a 15W TDP, making them ideal for slim, full featured laptops. The i7-8650U, i7-8550U, i5-8350U and i5-8250U are all 4 core parts and all have Hyperthreading enabled - a first for a 15W part. The i7s have an 8MB L3 cache an the i5s a 6MB cache. Intel has also included UHD 620 integrated graphics, which is capable of 4K video playback and near real-time 4K rendering with Intel Quicksync. Intel are claiming a huge 40% increase in multi-tasking performance versus the previous generation CPUs and a 2.3x speed increase versus a 5-year-old Ivy Bridge based system. A big chunk of that performance increase are the two new Hyperthreaded cores, but a large part is also due to an improvement in design optimisation and manufacturing processes compared to the 7thgeneration chips.