The information came through leaks in benchmarking software developer Futuremark’s 3dMark database. While not a lot is known, and what is known could change vastly over the course of the next few months, we can make some reasonable assumptions from the evidence we have. Check out our 8700k review here. While the last processor face-off fell heavily in Intel’s favour, AMD did have the core advantage – and so pulled ahead in certain situations where having more cores brought better performance over raw clock speed. The new series of 8th gen processors from Intel is looking to have something to say about that, however. Read about the 10th-gen laptop processors: Ice Lake.
Specification rumours
The new processors are rumoured to feature 8 cores at a 2.2GHz frequency, with a 16MB cache. With hyper-threading, we’re looking at a 16 thread set up to directly rival Ryzen’s offering. However, with the second generation of Ryzen processors not too far away either – this could be a very interesting couple of months.
Release date
While nothing is even remotely close to being set in stone, we imagine an early Q3 release is the most likely for the new models.
Price
These processors will be coming in at an interesting price point, as while they certainly won’t be cheap, they’re filling the gap between the 6-core i7-8700k and the 18-core i9-7980XE. While they probably won’t have the same individual core grunt of the 8700k, so perhaps won’t be quite as good for running programs that aren’t optimised for multi-core use, they will excel at operations like video rendering. It is suggested, however, that you’ll need the new Intel Z390 motherboard to socket one of these processors. So bundling the cost of the board in with the CPU upgrade, this could get a little pricey. We’d expect to see the new processors come in roughly around the £300-400 mark, but that’s an educated guess at best.
