Intel 8th Gen desktop CPU packaging confirms jump to six cores and more

Earlier this morning, Intel kicked off its series of 8th Gen CPU announcements by unveiling the low-power U-series for notebooks. However, there is still more to come, as Intel still has its desktop 8th Gen processors to announce. We have already heard several rumours about these processors and now, thanks to images of the retail packaging appearing, a few of them are confirmed.

Images of the retail packaging for both the 8th Gen Core i5 and Core i7 have appeared on Intel’s own website. It is a side view of the box, so we can see the list of key features that Intel is looking to push:

As you can see, both the Core i5 and Core i7 will be jumping to six core designs for 8th Gen. Aside from that, we can see Turbo Boost 2.0, Smart Cache, Optane Memory Support and dual-channel DDR4 will all be supported. Integrated graphics will be bumped up to Intel UHD Graphics 630.

Aside from confirming the jump to six cores, the packaging also states that these new CPUs will require the 300-series chipset. This is something that ASRock confirmed for us just a few weeks ago. This is all we know about Intel’s 8th generation CPUs officially for the time being. However, we did see an interesting leak last Friday:

Kaby Lake	Single-thread Performance Gain (%)	Multi-thread Performance Gain (%)	Coffee Lake
Core i7 7700K	11	51	Core i7 8700K
Core i7 7700	18	58	Core i7 8700
Core i5 7600K	19	55	Core i5 8600K
Core i5 7400	29	61	Core i5 8400
Core i3 7350K	17	65	Core i3 8350K
Core i3 7100	16	61	Core i3 8100

The table above contains information coming out of a Chinese presentation leak that surfaced on Friday. These are the performance gains we are currently expecting to see when jumping from 7th Gen to 8th Gen on the desktop. These numbers have yet to be confirmed, so do take it with a grain of salt.

KitGuru Says: It looks like Intel will finally be going beyond quad-core SKUs for its mainstream desktop processors. With that in mind, the 8th Generation will be pretty interesting to look at and compare against Ryzen.

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