It was initially believed that Intel will launch its 8th generation Core “Coffee Lake” desktop processor lineup with only 6-core SKUs in the Core i5 and Core i7 extensions, priced well above $200; with Core i3 SKUs joining in Q1-2018. A popular retailer confirmed to us that the first wave will include two Core i3 SKUs, namely the Core i3-8100 and Core i3-8350K. Both these chips are quad-core, and lack both HyperThreading and Turbo Boost, but feature rather high clock speeds.
The Core i3-8350K is a particularly interesting SKU. This 4-core/4-thread chip features an unlocked base-clock multiplier, and 8 MB of L3 cache, as opposed to 6 MB on the i3-8100. Just as Intel previously differentiated its Core i3-x1xx SKUs from i3-x3xx SKUs by giving the latter 33.33% more L3 cache, the trend is continuing with the 8th generation, except that both the core-count and L3 cache amount has doubled over the 7th generation. The prices could be noticeably higher, too. The six SKUs Intel will launch for the retail channel on the 5th of October, are tabled below.
Source: TPU
