For the first time, Intel’s upcoming eighth-generation Core CPUs will feature quad-core processors inside of its chips aimed at ultrabooks, offering performance as much as 40% faster than in the previous generation, the company has said.
Intel has not disclosed the prices of its four new 15-watt 8th generation Core U-series chips, though the company has revealed how fast they will run. The slowest Core i5-8250U will run at 1.6GHz, with a boost clock of 3.4GHz; the fastest Core i7-8650U will run at 1.9GHz, boosting up to 4.2GHz.
All four U-series chips include four cores and eight threads. PCs using the new 8th generation Core chips should begin shipping soon, Intel said, with about 80 new system designs ready to go by the 2017 holiday season.
The more interesting story perhaps, will be how Intel has loosened the definition of “generation,” as a slowing Moore’s Law has thrown off the company’s legendary tick-tock manufacturing process. These 8th generation CPUs are not the upcoming Coffee Lake, as previously expected. Intel characterises its new chips as a “Kaby Lake refresh,” referring to the current Kaby Lake chips as “prior generation” parts. And here is another surprise, both Coffee Lake and the upcoming 10-nm Cannon Lake chips will all be part of Intel’s eighth-generation Core branding.
Name games
Confused? Let us sum up: Intel’s eighth-generation Core chips will include three separate chip architectures and two process technologies, all under a single brand name.
Intel has muddied its brands before. In 2013, Intel began taking traditional P brands like Celeron and Pentium, throwing them on top of non-PC Atom chips. The current Core i9 family includes both Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X chips. But we have not seen a scenario where Intel apparently has thrown branding to the winds. More than ever, savvy PC buyers and builders will have to research which upcoming parts are going into their builds.
It is important to note two key points about Intel’s new eighth-generation chips. First, that a combination of process technology, design, and optimisations yielded the 40% improvement. Second, that performance boost is more than double what Intel promised with the launch of the Kaby Lake chip, which saw increases of between 12 and 19% over the Skylake generation.
Intel would have seen a 25% generation-to-generation boost with its 8th generation, U-series chips simply by increasing the number of cores from two to a total of four, according to Karen Regis, director of mobile platform marketing for Intel. Tightening some of the manufacturing parameters allowed for higher clock speeds, she said.
Though rival AMD has not disclosed its plans for its mobile “Raven Ridge” chips, AMD’s low-power Ryzen 3 chips use four cores and (only) four threads. Applying more cores to multithreaded applications has been one of the ways AMD has touted a performance advantage.
Hypothetical performance
As it normally does, Intel demonstrated the hypothetical performance of the 8th generation Core chips in a number of ways. Intel’s new U-series chips will create a 4K video in three minutes on PowerDirector Ultra HD (HEVC), 14.5 times faster than a five-year-old Core i5 Ivy Bridge PC. In Adobe Lightroom, the new chips will be 28% faster than 7th-gen Kaby Lake parts, or 2.3 times faster than a 5-year-old PC. Intel’s own content tests show the 8th gen U-series parts will be 48% faster in slideshow creation than its 7th-gen predecessors. (According to information provided by an Intel spokesman, Intel’s new U-series chips use Intel’s Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0, boosting not one but two cores at the maximum rate.)
In several cases, Intel made its generational comparisons versus the Core i7-7500U, the Kaby Lake chip launched a year ago—apparently carving out the “Kaby Lake refresh” chips as a half- or semi-generational family. PC makers PCWorld has spoken to have begun referring to the family as “Kaby Lake-R.” Theoretically, that would mean that Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby Lake, Kaby Lake-R, and probably Coffee Lake would all be based on 14-nm technology—five separate families of parts manufactured on a single process, versus the once-traditional two.
Officially, Intel’s new U-series chips are “based on the Kaby Lake architecture and 14nm+ process technology with additional design improvements and new optimisations,” a spokeswoman said. “We’ve redefined and reimagined what 8th generation will mean,” Regis added.
Platform improvements
Expect the dramatic performance improvements to be Kaby Lake R’s selling point, Intel executives said. With Kaby Lake, Intel touted the architecture’s new video engine as the main selling point, rather than the modest performance increases within the chip itself.
Specifically, Kaby Lake could perform hardware-based 4K HEVC encoding/decoding at 10-bit depths, or VP9 decoding. Netflix was the chief proponent of the technology, but now both Amazon and Vudu have signed on, Intel executives said. Amazon will roll out support in the fourth quarter.
According to Intel, ultrabooks using the new chips should see about 10 hours of battery life, or almost 12 hours playing back YouTube, Regis said.
Another under-the-hood reason to buy a Kaby Lake-R chip is its inclusion of Intel’s Software Guard Extensions, or SGX. According to PowerDVD, the company’s software player was the only way to play UltraHD Blu-rays as of March—and it required SGX technology. “We expect more than 90% of 8th gen systems [from PC makers] will be SGX ready, allowing more 4K premium content from services,” an Intel spokesman said in an email.
Games that were previously restricted by the CPU will also see a bit more freedom, according to Chris Walker, the vice president of Intel’s Client Computing Group and the general manager of the Client Mobility Group. More importantly, the new platforms support Intel’s Optane, which Intel is pitching as a technology to give hard drives SSD-like performance, as well as Thunderbolt.
“With the use of Thunderbolt, you can now expand out with the new graphics docks coming to market,” Walker said. Graphics docks allow external graphics cards to be used in conjunction with ultrabooks and other devices that can’t squeeze them in. More docks will be coming to market, both from PC makers and other partners, he said. The new 8th generation Core chips will also have enough power for the new mixed-reality solutions being developed by Acer and others, in conjunction with Microsoft.
Intel even showed off a few of the concept PCs the company is building around the new 8th generation Core chips, but declined to release public details at this time.
What the future holds
Tweaking an established design and process has paid off in terms of availability. Consumer desktops based on the new 8th generation Core designs will ship a bit earlier this year than they did with the 7th generation devices, Walker said. Early next year, Intel will ship 8th generation parts for commercial clients, both desktop and mobile, then gaming notebooks. Intel plans fanless PCs using the 4.5W Y-series near the beginning of 2018, he added. The company is also talking about “other options purpose-built for different segments,” Walker said, but the company hasn’t disclosed what exactly those will be. “It’s a fairly consistent timeframe and rollout,” Walker said.
Some key questions about these chips remain unanswered: How much will they cost? How much will built systems cost? What will the performance be? If Coffee Lake is an 8th generation Core chip, will it use the same motherboards as Kaby Lake? (An Intel spokeswoman declined to comment.)
We will also be interested to see whether anyone other than enthusiasts and industry followers care whether Intel mixes processor architectures and manufacturing technologies. One analyst thinks most everyday buyers will not care.
“Reaction to the branding strategy will be different dependent on the audience,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights. “To enterprises, gamers and enthusiasts, it won’t matter. Mainstream consumers are oblivious and really don’t pay attention to the [generations], but want to know they have the ‘fresh fish.'”
Retailers and distributors will have to pay attention to that aspect, he said.
IDG News Service
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