Intel’s next-generation Coffee Lake chipset gets reviewed
- okt
- 07
Interested in what will power your next-gen Mac? the future looks promising!
Intel has "released" its 8th generation Core I7 Processors called Coffee Lake and the initial reviews show that the flagship consumer desktop version, the 8700k, is pretty damn good.
The 8700k sports 6 cores at the 14nm process and runs at a max turbo frequency of 4.7 GHz. Pretty damn good indeed.
You may have noticed the quotations around the word released since, at least for PC enthusiasts, the 8700k is really difficult to come by. Any retailer selling them sell out very quickly with no suggestion as to when any will be available again.
Jim at AdoredTV has the rundown on how this is a paper launch and what that means.
For us Mac enthusiasts, being a paper launch is a much-of-a-muchness so to speak since a full refresh of the Mac lineup won't happen until sometime in 2018 and by then any supply chain issues will be solved.
The team at Digital Foundry have given the 8700k their stamp of approval by calling it the fastest gaming CPU money can buy. Now you may be saying that gaming benchmarks don't mean anything for Mac users but the video shows some creation and productivity benchmarks as well.
The amazing thing about these benchmarks is that there is no single-core performance loss due to the Coffee Lake 8700k having two extra cores than their previous generation CPU, the 7700k.
Typically, having more cores causes thermal issues where manufacturers have to reduce the clock frequency to alleviate the heat produced by the extra cores. Not true this time!
While some titles show little improvement for those applications that are single threaded, the titles that do benefit from the extra cores really shine through.
Secondly, and this is where these results will apply for Apple consumers, the fact that the 8700K is competing and at times besting Intel's own Skylake-X 7800k as well as AMD's Ryzen 1800x in productivity and content creation shows what a winner this will turn out to be for consumers.
Are you planning to upgrade your Mac next year?
In my opinion, it will be a good time to upgrade your Mac next year. Finally, due to heavy competition from AMD, Intel has had to step up their game. No more incremental upgrades to their top-of-the-line desktop CPU line. Coffee Lake finally provides major improvements to various applications that will make this a worthwhile update.
What are your thoughts? Are you planning on buying a Coffee Lake-based Mac? Let us know in the comments!