Intel coffee lake and z370 platform, all the news

Lack of competition causes a stagnation in the technology sector, this is what we have experienced the last 6 years since the successful Intel Sandy Bridge processors and the failed AMD Bulldozer arrived. The introduction of AMD Ryzen processors has forced Intel to rethink its strategy of thinking only of processors with a high number of cores in the HEDT segment. This requires a major overhaul of its mainstream range models and that is precisely what the new Coffee Lake means, the biggest leap taken by Intel in this area since the arrival of Sandy Bridge in 2011.

All improvements made to Intel Coffee Lake

Coffe Lake-S are the new Intel processors for the desktop within the mainstream or general consumer range. These new silicons continue to use the 14nm manufacturing process that debuted with Broadwell and is going to be one of the longest-running and most refined in recent years. Logically the process has been refined over the years and this is what has led Intel to name it 14 nm ++.

The big change with Coffee Lake is in an increase in processor cores and efficiency, thanks to a fine-tuning process that Intel has used to get the most out of an architecture that is still Skylake with some modifications. The eighth generation of Intel processors comes to offer the most powerful gaming processor on the market, the Intel Core i7 8700K.

These new Coffee Lake will have 2 more cores in each range, in this way the Core i3 will have 4 cores and 4 threads, the Core i5 will have 6 cores and 6 threads and finally the Core i7 6 cores and 12 threads. Our readers will have noticed that the new Core i3 no longer have Intel's Hyperthreading technology, so their number of physical and logical cores is the same.

Intel continues to use the LGA 1151 socket for these Coffee Lake, although the new Z370 chipset is needed so they cannot be used in the previous 100 and 200 series motherboards. This is due to the fact that due to the greater number of cores and PCIe tracks, the boards need more electrical connections than in the Z270 and earlier. Some of the improvements introduced in the new platform are: greater compatibility with Optane, up to 40 PCIe tracks and better overclocking capacity.

Thanks to the increase in the number of cores the performance of these new processors is greatly improved compared to previous generations, the creation of multimedia content improves up to 32%, making them ideal for editing video in the heavy 4K resolution.. Support for hardware 4K HDR and faster content loading is also added if we use Optane. Intel places a lot of emphasis on the multimedia section, which is why integrated graphics are called Intel UHD to adapt to an era in which 4K is in fashion and talking about HD is already outdated. Despite this, they are still the same GPUs as those used in the previous generation with some additions such as the aforementioned support for 4K HDR by hardware.

These new Coffee Lake will also delight overclockers with core tuning, real-time latency control, real-time PLL Trim controls, Intel Extreme Tuning (Intel XTU) utility, and support for XMP memory profiles. All of these improvements should help to achieve higher maximum operating frequencies and therefore superior final performance in all types of tasks.

We have a total of 6 processors within the new Coffee Lake-S family, Core i3 8100, Core i3 8350K, Core i5 8400, Intel Core i5 8600K, Core i7 8700, and Core i7 8700K. As always, K models have the multiplier unlocked for overclocking. All of them have frequencies ranging between 2.8 and 4 GHz, TDPs between 65 and 95 W, Smart Cache between 6 and 12 MB, and a dual channel DDR4 memory controller at 2, 400 MHz for the Core i3 and 2, 666 MHz for Core i5 and Core i7. Other improvements have to do with a more aggressive Turbo Boost 2.0 to achieve higher frequencies, an Intel Smart Cache that is managed by the core to avoid latencies and support for advanced instructions such as Intel TSX, AVX2 and SGX.

Final words and conclusion

To summarize we can affirm that the new Coffee Lake processors are still more than the Kaby Lake with a greater number of cores and some additional improvements in the field of overclocking, memory and PCI Express support as we have discussed above. The new Core i5 may be the most interesting processors for gamers since their performance will be above the current Core i7 in all kinds of tasks, 6 cores and 6 processing threads seem to be the configuration that is best able to take advantage of video games of the current generation.

For users who need high power for other tasks such as demanding video rendering, they can greatly benefit from the more powerful new generation Core i7. In any case, this is the first step for much more powerful new Intel processors over the next few years.