Leaks out Intel's Coffee Lake launch plans, pricing

Intel appears to be having difficulties keeping a lid on its upcoming Coffee Lake processor launch, with numerous leaks offering rumoured specifications and pricing for the Kaby Lake successor with which the company hopes to head off the threat from rival AMD's Ryzen family.

Previously teased by Intel with the promise of a launch by year's end, Coffee Lake is the eight generation implementation of the company's Core architecture and a successor to the current Kaby Lake microarchitecture. A refinement of the Kaby Lake platform, Coffee Lake is based on the same 14nm process node with its own successor Cannon Lake to be the first to switch to a 10nm node. At the time, Intel promised a greater-than-15 percent performance boost over Kaby Lake as measured by the SysBench benchmark - roughly equivalent to the improvement offered by Kaby Lake itself to its own predecessor Skylake - though the company did not offer any further details or specifications.

Leaks, though, have begun to provide the details Intel itself has been unwilling to share - at least in rumour form. A since-removed thread on the ChipHell forum - available without imagery in Google Cache format - captured and duplicated by Anandtech late last week offered claimed specifications for the Coffee Lake Core i5 and i7 desktop lineups ranging from entry-level two-core four-thread parts with a 51W thermal design profile (TDP) to a range-topping six-core twelve-thread part with a 95W TDP.

Since then, portable computing specialist Liliputing has reported on Coffee Lake laptops from Acer, Asus, and HP, while Intel's official price list details wholesale rates and base specifications for the as-yet unannounced laptop-centric low-power Core i5 and Core i7 U-family ranges.

Intel, however, is still stubbornly silent on officially announcing the parts, leaving those interested in purchasing a Coffee Lake CPU or system holding their wallets in anticipation - but crucially, and this may perhaps prove telling of why Intel has suddenly begun leaking information like a proverbial sieve, not opening said wallets for rival AMD's Ryzen family of processors.