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Intel's Coffee Lake 8700K Will Offer More Than a Bump in Cores

PC enthusiasts will be french pressed to find a better gaming CPU in 2017.

Chris Jarrard

August 17, 2017 11:00 AM

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The slow drip of information on Intel’s upcoming Coffee Lake products continues to fill our styrofoam cups. Previous reports have hinted that the new architecture from Intel will see the light of day before the end of this year and bring some meaningful changes to the company’s mainstream computing lineup. The Core i7 series will get its first 6-core part, expected to be named i7-8700K when the platform launches.

While the increased core count would normally be enough to whip up excitement for the launch, new leaks from an Intel retail training slide show that Intel is promising a single-threaded performance gain of more than ten percent over the reigning king of single-core speed, the Core i7-7700K. The Kaby Lake release earlier this year was a letdown for owners of Intel’s Skylake i7-6700K since the 7700K offered no additional performance when the two CPUs were compared clock for clock.

Intel’s slide also claims a more than 50 percent gain in performance over the 7700K in heavily-threaded workloads, which makes sense when the additional cores on the 8700K are considered. All of this is good news for Intel fans since AMD has been eating Intel’s lunch in multi-threaded performance with its Ryzen CPUs that launched in the Spring. Intel’s Kaby Lake parts offered little advantage over the Ryzen CPUs except in lightly-threaded gaming and a few older apps.

There is currently no official release date for the 8700K, though Intel is expected to formally announce the new lineup on August 21st. Hopefully I‘m not blinded by the solar eclipse and will be able to see the 8700K in action.

Chris Jarrard

Contributing Tech Editor

Chris Jarrard likes playing games, crankin' tunes, and looking for fights on obscure online message boards. He understands that breakfast food is the only true food. Don't @ him.