Intel’s new Coffee Lake i7 is smashing records at an affordable price
Two world records. Nine global first places. It looks like CPU innovation is back.
Earlier today, Intel announced the launch of the 8th generation “Coffee Lake” consumer CPUs. On the same day, eleven records have been broken according to HWBOT, including a world record 3DMark06 score and a best-in-its-class Cinebench score (both massively overclocked).
This means Coffee Lake looks to be a fantastic platform for overclocking enthusiasts, because all of this was achieved with just a 1% increase of top clock speed over the Core i7–7700k (with 7405.12MHz the record for the 8700k and 7383.72MHz the record for the 7700k). A combination of two more cores, the massive IPC boost, which may be one of the largest ever, and no deduction in max clock speed work together to make this possible.
Even if you’re not an overclocking guru, Coffee Lake looks to be a great platform. Intel has finally ditched 2-core Core processors, leaving only low-end Pentium and Celeron 2-core CPUs. All three levels had two cores tacked onto them, with Core i3 CPUs now having four cores and both Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs having six. In multithreaded workloads, such as video editing, the new Coffee Lake CPUs may be the fastest. In gaming workloads, chances are an i3 is probably sufficient, even though Hyper-threading has been ditched on all but the Core i7 series, since four cores at 4GHz is very similar to last generation’s Core i5–7600k, which was the top-of-the-line Core i5.
It looks like competition in the CPU market has made Intel actually put some work into producing an innovative product, rather than last generation’s product with some small IPC improvement.
