Intel’s Coffee Lake Makes Six-Core Mainstream
COFFEE LAKE is both a significant upgrade to Intel’s mainstream CPU line, and one of the longest delays between meaningful improvements. If you’re an enthusiast who’s already upgraded to a six-core, 12-thread (6C12T) processor, Coffee Lake might not seem
The i7-5820K dropped the entry price for six-core, 12-thread chips to $389 in 2014—basically the same as today’s i7-8700K. The problem is that Intel’s mainstream platform, LGA115x, has stuck at fourcore, eight-thread since 2009’s first-gen Core i7s.
That’s eight years of stagnation, largely because AMD never had a superior product. Ryzen changed that, and while it doesn’t win every benchmark, the availability of competitive 8C16T chips at prices that undercut Intel’s 4C8T CPUs looks bad, and the 6C12T Ryzen 5 parts cost less than most of Intel’s 4C4T Core i5 parts. If you’re running workloads that can benefit from more cores/threads, Ryzen has been an easy recommendation since launch.
After coasting on the mainstream platform for eight years, Intel has been able to rapidly release more cores and higher performance. Coffee Lake has better per-core performance than Ryzen, and clock speeds that are up to 30 percent higher. What’s more, unlike the mesh topology used in Skylake-X, Coffee Lake sticks with Intel’s ring bus.
The result is some killer performance, with the i78700K claiming top marks among 6C12T products. It’s also the fastest CPU I’ve ever tested from a gaming perspective, with stock clock speeds as high as 4.7GHz—despite only having a dual-channel memory controller. Not to be outdone, the i5-8400 is a 6C6T part that includes reasonable (3.8–4.0GHz) clocks, and in a large suite of games, it matches the performance of a stock i7-7700K—at about half the price and two-thirds the power use.
The problem is that Coffee Lake uses the same LGA1151 socket as Skylake and Kaby Lake, except the pin-out has changed, and a new chipset and mobo is required. That’s a low blow, even from Intel, considering Z270 boards aren’t even a year old. Coffee Lake is also the third new platform from Intel in 2017, which is insane. Add in AMD’s various Ryzen and Threadripper launches, and 2017 is the most excitement we’ve seen in the CPU sector in ages.
If you upgraded to Kaby Lake, Ryzen, or Skylake-X, you don’t need to upgrade to Coffee Lake—but the desire to do so may be hard to resist. I also have to ding Intel for sticking with its cheaper and less desirable thermal interface material, instead of solder. I overclocked the i7-8700K to 4.8GHz, but without delidding, it hit nearly 100 C under load. Ouch!
As exciting as 2017 has been, there are indications 2018 won’t slow down. Rumblings from AMD hint at architectural tweaks enabling better per-core performance and higher clock speeds, and Ryzen 2 (or whatever it’s called) will run in existing AM4 motherboards. Not to be outdone, Intel could release an 8C16T Coffee Lake chip—though that would require a new die. And Intel’s 10nm Cannon Lake chips should finally arrive by the end of 2018, possibly sooner. Here’s to competition, and more reasons to think about building another PC.