The benchmarks will give us a better idea of performance-per-dollar compared to Kaby Lake and Ryzen, though. With the exception of Ryzen 3, AMD maintains a price advantage across its portfolio, due in part to SMT on the Ryzen 5 family. Again, Intel removed Hyper-Threading from its Core i3s, so their price per thread remains unchanged. Intel adds a ~$20 premium to its K-series SKUs compared to their Kaby Lake equivalents. We may see higher prices on Intel's CPUs at retail, while AMD models routinely sell below MSRP. We're using Intel's 1K unit pricing for comparisons to the Kaby Lake models and AMD's MSRP for price-equivalent Ryzen chips. But it's a little bit overkill for everyone else. Paying a premium for Z-class core logic isn't much of a surprise for enthusiasts, who need the higher-end chipset to support unlocked multipliers. And in a clear indication that Intel really hurried its launch schedule, less expensive B- or H-series chipsets won't be ready until next year. The 200-series chipsets are not compatible.
You'll need a Z370-based motherboard for Coffee Lake processors. Intel reminds us, though, that it offers up to 40 lanes when we add the platform controller hub's 24. PCIe connectivity remains unchanged you get 16 lanes of third-gen PCIe from the CPU's controller. Core i3-8100 is the lone exception with only 6MB of 元 cache. As a side effect of its higher core counts, then, Coffee Lake processors enjoy the benefits of more cache. Physical cores are always preferable to logical ones, so the new implementation of Core i3 should come out ahead in most of our benchmarks.Īs expected, most models continue to wield 2MB of 元 and 256KB of L2 cache per core. You do get 100% more cores in exchange, though. So, we could see a performance dip in lightly threaded workloads due to Coffee Lake's lower base frequencies. Unfortunately, Intel still doesn't enable Turbo Boost on its Core i3 CPUs. Intel confirms that Coffee Lake continues to employ its ring bus, rather than Skylake-X's mesh topology. That's naturally larger than Kaby Lake's ~122mm 2, reflecting the additional execution and cache resources. Intel isn't officially disclosing a die size or transistor count, but early delidding efforts indicate a ~151mm 2 area. All gains come from core count and clock rate alone. Because these CPUs employ Intel's Skylake architecture, we aren't expecting any speed-ups attributable to IPC throughput. But Core i7-8700K also includes aggressive multi-core bins to help chew through threaded workloads. The top 4.7 GHz Turbo Boost bin should help improve performance in lightly-threaded applications. As you might imagine, then, the impact of two additional cores is felt under load. And as we've seen before, Turbo Boost allows the CPU to operate beyond its rated TDP as long as current, power, and temperature fall below specified limits.
But that's only 4% higher than Core i7-7700K. A more complex die does necessitate a TDP rating of up to 95W. Those advances enable the higher Turbo Boost bins and reduce consumption enough to carve out room for extra cores. The -8700K's Coffee Lake design utilizes a 14nm++ process, which Intel claims offers 26% more performance and 52% less leakage power than first-generation 14nm manufacturing. Its 3.7 GHz specification is 500 MHz lower than the -7700K, offsetting the increased power consumption and heat generated by a 6C/12T configuration.
The -8700K does sacrifice some base frequency in exchange for a higher core count, though. It features the company's highest clock rates, accelerating up to 4.7 GHz via Turbo Boost. Already, that's a big increase from Kaby Lake's 4C/8T maximum. Core i7-8700K serves as this generation's flagship, sporting six Hyper-Threaded cores.