Intel's Coffee Lake processors for desktop PCs are rather highly anticipated by enthusiasts and gamers. At last, with these 8th gen processors, Intel will deliver higher core counts to the masses. Last week we saw some 8th gen desktop processor packaging confirming a number of important things, namely the Core i5 and Coe i7 Core/Thread counts, and the fact that these new processors will require new motherboards - with Intel 300 Series chipsets onboard.
Further interesting information regarding the Coffee Lake processors for desktop PCs emerged this weekend. Tech site Hot Hardware spotted some new SiSoft Sandra benchmark database entries for 8th gen CPUs, specifically the Core i7 8700K and i5 8400K. The data garnered from the benchmark runs was subsequently compared against the Core i7 7700K and Core i5-7600K respectively. I've reproduced the results, as published by Hot Hardware below:
Core i7 8700K (6C/12T) vs Core i7 7700K (4C/8T)
- Processor Arithmetic: 217.98 GOPS (versus 149.99 GOPS)—45 per cent increase
- Processor Multi-Media: 658.57 Mpix/s (versus 447.76 Mpix/s)—47 per cent increase
- Processor Cryptography: 10.47 GB/s (versus 9.34 GB/s)—12 per cent increase
- Scientific Analysis (Single Precision): 61.41 GFLOPS (versus 48.51 GFLOPS)—26 per cent increase
- Scientific Analysis (Double Precision): 32.11 GFLOPS (versus 24.40 GFLOPS)—32 per cent increase
On average the 8th gen Core i7 with its extra cores/threads and microarchitecture tweaks shows a 32.4 per cent jump in performance.
Core i5-8400K (6C/6T) vs Core i5-7600K (4C/4T)
- Processor Arithmetic: 145.05 GOPS (103.66 GOPS)—40 per cent increase
- Processor Multi-Media: 420.54 Mpix/s (279.69 Mpix/s)—50 per cent increase
- Processor Cryptography: 9.78 GB/s (8.45 GB/s)—14 per cent increase
- Scientific Analysis (Single Precision): 71.68 GFLOPS (51.38 GFLOPS)—39 per cent increase
- Scientific Analysis (Double Precision): 31.35 GFLOPS (26.72 GFLOPS)—17 per cent increase
Directly above we see that the new Core i5 with 6 physical cores provides an average 32 per cent performance improvement across the range of benchmarks.
It could still be a month or more before Intel officially releases its Coffee Lake desktop CPUs (this 'Fall') so it's good to see these synthetic performance indicators for now. Pricing will be key to the adoption of these new CPUs with upgraders who need to factor in new motherboard costs.
