Last year, a set of interesting Intel slides leaked out. Looking past Kaby Lake and into Coffee Lake, the slides purportedly showed 6 cores CPUs entering the mainstream Intel lineup. Since the beginning of the Core series, 4 cores have been the maximum we ‘ve seen on the mainstream platform. According to a new report out, we have even more confirmation that Coffee Lake will feature 6 core processors and arrive in early 2018.
Coffee Lake is expected to be yet another 14nm node to follow Kaby Lake. Reports have suggested that while the mobile and low-power chips will arrive with Cannon Lake 10nm, the desktop platform will be stuck on 14nm for another release. To better entice users upgrade, Intel is working on releasing 6 core CPUs for the mainstream LGA 115x platform. It is also expected to act as a counter to AMD’s Ryzen which appears to be offering mainstream 6 cores and 8 cores for cheap.
For now, none of this information has been confirmed by Intel but it would not be surprising. After a decade of the quad core being the best you could get from Intel’s mainstream lineup, its time for something new. This is speculation, but it is also possible Intel may revamp their lineup as well. With Pentiums gaining hyper-threading, it may be time for the i3s to move to quad cores, the i5 to be quad cores with hyperthreading and the 6 cores chips as i7s. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait for 2018 for more information.
