Coffee Lake Thread

[SteelCrysis]

http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory...17.html#s4

During its keynote, Intel made a brief mention that its 8th generation processors offer up to 30% more performance than its 7th generation products. Of course, many took that to mean IPC-boosting architectural enhancements, but we don’t really know for sure, because Intel unfortunately didn’t provide any context during the keynote.

The press release was equally unclear, but we examined the footnotes and found that the hyperthreaded processors have twice the number of physical cores than the previous generation and a 500MHz increase to the TurboBoost clock. Doubling the number of cores within the same 15W TDP envelope is an impressive achievement, but it kind of takes the shine off of a mere 30% performance increase.

The catch? Intel didn’t run the tests on the final product it brought out on stage. Instead, the company used pre-silicon estimates that have a +/- 7% margin of error, so the final product may fall short of projections.

To Intel's credit, it could have emulated a heavily-threaded and unrealistic synthetic benchmark (Cinebench comes to mind) to expose a 50% performance delta, but instead chose to emulate real applications with the SYSmark application.

In either case, the next generation looks promising, but the newly-competitive CPU market might find us more closely reading through ambiguous announcements like these in the future as Intel and AMD jockey for the marketing edge.