Coffee Lake processors are coming, and with Intel unveiling its 8th generation U-series CPUs, it’s only a matter of time before the desktop chips arrive. Perhaps someone at Intel was jumping the gun on the 8th generation processor family, because for a short while, numerous sources (including Tech Report) claimed to have seen the anticipated Coffee Lake Core i7 and i5 desktop CPU packaging detailed on Intel’s website.
It’s not like mocked-up images of future products haven’t been leaked before, but reports pegged Intel itself as the source of the images. When we sought to locate the images ourselves, though, we came up empty--they were no longer online. We reached out to Intel to inquire about the pictures and product pages in question, and a company representative replied with the following statement:
“We did replace the images because they were not representative of what we launched today – our 8th Gen Intel Core U-series processors. We’ll share more information on the rest of the 8th Gen Intel Core family soon.”
This admission confirms a few things for us. First and foremost, the images of the upcoming Coffee Lake processor boxes circulating the web appear to be legitimately from Intel. However, Intel did not confirm nor deny any of the details appearing on the images, replying to further questions by saying only, “We’ll have more to share on 8th Gen desktop processors soon.”
Despite the company’s backpeddling (and pending any major revisions), the legitimacy of the images all but confirms that 300-series motherboards will be a requirement for the new Core i7 and i5 Coffee Lake CPUs. Furthermore, both the Core i7 and i5 will feature up to six cores each, with the Hyperthreaded Core i7 sporting 12 threads (the i5 doesn’t have Hyperthreading). Intel UHD Graphics 630 also appears to be along for the ride. Although its name implies high-resolution display output, changes to the integrated graphics are expected to be minor, so graphics performance should remain similar to existing models.
The only real question that remains is whether or not Intel was the victim of a mistimed page launch or acted as the engineer of its own hype train. It seems like leaks are almost always a part of a major product’s launch in 2017 (thanks, internet), but the fact that Intel outed itself and then pulled back leads us to believe it may have simply been a timing error.
