Intel Coffee Lake explained

October 16 2017, 12:00pm

Intel's 8th-generation "Coffee Lake" CPUs are now on the market. These chips come with a modest bump in CPU frequency, but the big news is that Intel is finally adding 6-core processors to its mainstream i7 and i5 lines.

Intel used to release chips on a "tick-tock" cycle that saw every release alternate either a new design, or a new manufacturing process. But manufacturing challenges made tick-tock falter a few years ago, and now new releases are much harder to predict. New designs and nodes are coming, but we'll probably have to wait until they arrive in 2018 to see a big jump in performance.