One of the big differentiating factors between the top end AMD Ryzen CPUs and top Intel Coffee Lake chips at the end of 2017, was the number of cores and threads they sported. Although Intel did raise its own bar to six cores and 12 threads at the top end -- as AMD did at the mid-range -- it lacked an eight core version at the top end. That meant that as much as Intel's chips were more powerful at single threaded applications, the Ryzen chips really dominated in multithreaded scenarios, especially considering how much more affordable they were.
That may change with the upcoming Coffee Lake-S refresh from Intel, which will see it replace a number of chips in its eighth-generation, in a similar fashion to AMD's Ryzen+ chips. Although we don't have a full line up of Coffee Lake-S chips, one of them has appeared on Geekbench, giving us a quick insight into one of the new chips.
The CPU in question is an unnamed, "Genuine Intel CPU 0000" running at only 2.2GHz. That is unlikely to be the final clock speed. The 'core' takeaway though is that the Intel chip has eight cores and we've not seen that in a non Core-i9 CPU before.
As Hexus points out, the overall system makeup for the test bench was a Windows 10 64bit OS, with 16GB of RAM and a terabyte storage device. The motherboard was an engineering sample, so doesn't tell us anything in particular about the new-generation chips, though they are likely to be a part of the H370, or Z390 range, which are part of Intel's planned Mainstream and Enthusiast chipset ranges.
Considering the Z390 is set to debut this summer, it wouldn't be a surprise to see these new Coffee Lake-S chips show up alongside them.
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