According to a screenshot posted on a Chinese forum (if those alarm bells aren’t clanging like a frickin’ church wedding already, there’s something wrong with you) Intel are going to be releasing a 4GHz Core i3 CPU in the 8th Gen range which comes with four HyperThreaded cores spitting out eight threads.
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There isn’t enough salt in Utah to deal with this new Intel Coffee Lake rumour, but I kinda still feel it’s worth sharing for the sheer ‘WTF?’ nature of it. I mean, realistically, if this is true, and Intel decide to let a Core i3 commit fratricide on the touted six-core Coffee Lake Core i5, then Chipzilla will have truly lost the plot.
With eight threads running at 4GHz that would almost put it on par with a current-gen i7 from the Kaby Lake range. And that, in turn, would put it above the non-HyperThreaded six-core Coffee Lake CPU, which is supposedly only going to be capable of Turbo-ing to 3.4GHz.
I know they might be starting to feel like they need to compete with a resurgent AMD’s processing division, especially after the Ryzen 3 1300X seems to have nailed the budget end, but this is really not the way to go about it. I told you they can’t remember how to deal with this stuff anymore.
This touted Core i3 8300 would see Intel essentially doubling the amount of silicon they dropped into the Core i3 7300, which has two cores and four threads, and operates at a base 4GHz. They’ll also be doubling the cache count too, which is to be expected with another two cores in the package.
But hey, if they stick to the same $140 price tag we’ll have a winning budget CPU on our hands and we don’t need to worry about anything above this in the CPU hierarchy until we get to the Ryzen 5 1600X. Which is great for us, even if it does entirely cannibalise the rest of the Intel CPU market….
Though, if this isn’t some mocked-up faux pic, I honestly have no clue what the tech world is up to anymore.