“We wanted to deliver the platform-wide improvements that embrace and enhance all of the incredible innovation around us – from 4K to VR and beyond – and make them more accessible to everyone”, Gregory Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group at Intel, said in a blog post. As you’ll see from the information revealed to the press, it seems like AMD Ryzen’s democratising effect on processor performance has pushed Intel to do the unthinkable.
Despite the speed bump, the chips are based on the same Kaby Lake microarchitecture as the 7th-generation Intel processors, and are manufactured using the same 14nm process.
The four CPUs in question are the Intel Core i5-8250U, i5-8350U, i7-8550U and i5-8650U. In the past, Intel has either used generational steps for introducing new chip architectures (say, the jump from 22nm to 14nm between Haswell and Broadwell) or to offer an improved version of the previous generation’s architecture (like Skylake, which was an upgraded version of the 14nm node). The company will continue the roll out of its 8th Gen Intel Core processors through the coming months, with the first desktop processors coming later in the year, followed by processors for enterprise customers and a broad range of other options purpose-built for different segments. Just how pessimistic that figure is will likely depend on manufacturers’ cooling implementations.
Intel unveiled a new generation of Core i5 and Core i7 processors on Monday, promising a 40 percent performance improvement over its current crop of CPUs.
Most critically, Intel claims that the added hardware doesn’t hurt battery life.
Observant readers will also note that Intel is now branding its onboard graphics processors as “Intel UHD graphics”. This feature doesn’t reflect any new capabilities in the graphics processor itself-this is still the same Gen9 IGP present in today’s Kaby Lake chips. However, the company would also reveal a member of its 9th-generation Core family: Ice Lake that would be built on a 10-nanometer plus process and would be launched in near future. The company says those products are coming “this fall”, but more precise details remain evasive. They also support Optane memory, a new technology Intel rolled out earlier this year to enable systems with conventional spinning hard disks rival the speed of PCs with solid state drives. We should expect higher-TDP and business-ready product lines to arrive on that timeline, as well.
“One of the great things about the 8th Gen Intel Core processor line-up is the scalability”.
