Intel’s Coffee Lake series of processors currently has a total of six different SKUs available, but a plethora of new chips will be released over the coming months, and these range from the lower end Celeron and Pentium chips to the higher performance echelons of the processors.
Intel’s MDDS (Material Declaration Datasheet) has officially confirmed eight of the unannounced Coffee Lake processors which leaked last November. Unfortunately, these chips are not the unlocked variety, and therefore for many enthusiasts might represent poorer value for money. These chips however will likely find a home in OEM rigs. For gamers and enthusiasts, we highly recommend an Intel I7-8700K or an Intel I5-8600K if you don’t need the extra threads and want to save the pennies.
The listed SKUs includes the Six-core and thread Core I5-8600 and I5-8500 (which will reside between the 8600K and the 8400… so pricing will be likely in the low $200 range). Next is a quad Core I3-8300m which is a quad core part. Given the SKU is higher performance than the I3-8100, its likely to cost a little over $120 USD.
Finally, there is a plethora of different Pentium Gold and Celeron products such as the Pentium Gold G5600, which is a 2 core / 4 thread part operating with just 3MB level 3 cache. Or how about the G4900, which sports just 2 processor cores without HyperThreading.
In the above table, you can see the list of processors listed in Intel’s MDDS. Of course, in the next few months Intel will need to contend with AMD’s Pinnacle Ridge and their refined 12nm CPUs, it’ll be very curious how the two companies compete throughout 2018.
