Intel’s technical documents hint at 8-core Coffee Lake CPUs launching this year

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The question is, will they work in existing 300-series motherboards, or require a brand new chipset?

There has been more than one leak suggesting that Intel is getting ready to launch an 8-core Coffee Lake processor, though the strongest evidence to date is a series of technical document listings on the company's website.

A user on Reddit discovered the listings, of which there are three that reference an unreleased "Coffee Lake S 8+2" part. Unless Intel suddenly changed its nomenclature, the 8+2 designation points to there being 8 CPU cores and integrated GT2 graphics on this particular chip. For reference, CPUs like the Core i7-8700K are listed as being Coffee Lake S 6+2 parts, indicating 6 CPU cores and GT2 graphics.

Unfortunately the documents themselves sit behind a login page, presumably for registered developers, so we can't click through and view them. However, since the listings appear under Intel's "8th Generation Technical Library," the assumption is that the 8-core part(s) will be marketed and sold under that generation. We can further extrapolate that they will be compatible with existing 300-series motherboards for Coffee Lake, if that's the case.

None of this is confirmed, however, and with Intel having introduced a new Z370 chipset that is required for current Coffee Lake chips, we wouldn't rule out Intel doing something similar with its upcoming 8-core parts. In fact, some of the speculation that is out there is that Intel will release a new Z390 chipset for a 9th generation Core processor lineup that includes 8-core CPUs. Intel's new H370, B360, and H310 chipsets also added a couple of new features that Z370 doesn't support, like 'modern standby' with wake on voice support, so Z390 might simply be the superset of all 300-series chipsets.

In short, we have more questions than answers, though we're optimistic that Intel will make these upcoming chips compatible with existing 300-series boards. Hopefully Intel will answer our questions soon.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).