Intel’s Perplexing Next Generation
Forget all you know about its lineup
INTEL’S EIGHTH-GENERATION CPUs are almost upon us, and they’re already looking intriguing, if only for the fact that we’ll see three technologies under that banner: a Kaby Lake refresh (14nm+), Coffee Lake (14nm++), and Cannonlake (10nm). It’s the laptop chips that we’ll see first, though, and I’m more stoked about these than the desktop counterparts, if only for personal reasons—I’m in the market for a new laptop.
With Ryzen kicking things up elsewhere, laptops feel like Intel’s last bastion of dominance. Its tech has focused on laptoploving efficiency for years, and AMD has always struggled to get chips into portable systems. Intel has come out swinging with its eighth-gen chips, though, squeezing an extra pair of cores into its mobile offerings.
If you’re familiar with Intel’s desktop lines, you’ll know that traditionally the difference between a Core i7 and a Core i5 is that the latter doesn’t support HyperThreading. But with its eighth-gen chips, that isn’t the case. Four 14nm chips have been announced so far: Core i7-8550U, i7-8650U, i5-8350U, and i5-8250U, and the weird thing is that they all have four cores and are capable of handling eight threads at once. The difference? Cache. Both Core i7 chips have access to 8MB of SmartCache, while the lowly Core i5s only lay claim to 6MB. A difference, but not quite in the same league as the outgoing lack of HyperThreading, or the fact that the equivalent chips from the previous generation had half the number of cores.
These chips are ultra low-power models designed for ultrabooks, two-in-ones, and all-in-ones, with a TDP of just 15W, but they do indicate that Intel isn’t taking anything for granted anymore, even if it does mean messing with our understanding of what separates a Core i7 from an i5. It looks like I couldn’t have picked a better time to upgrade my old laptop, it’s just a case of seeing what the system builders do with these chips now.