Intel announced a new Coffee Lake mobile CPU, the Core i3-8130U. It has two cores with SMT and a base clock of 2.2GHz, but it can boost with both cores to 3.4GHz.

Perhaps to detract a bit from AMD’s Ryzen G release, Intel made the odd choice of announcing a single, low-end, Kaby Lake-based mobile CPU. Although it is marketed as an 8th-gen Intel CPU, the i3-8130U is not part of the Kaby Lake-R family that other 8th-gen Intel mobile CPUs are in. All of those parts, such as the i7-8550U and the i5-8250U, have four cores with SMT. Given that the Core i3 designation is the lowest end of the Intel’s Core product lines, and that the i3-8130U is Intel’s only 8th-gen Core i3, it makes sense that Intel chose not to go with a four-core part.

So what is the i3-8130U then? Well, it's not a rebranding of its predecessor, the i3-7130U, but it’s not a big leap forward either. The new chip has the aforementioned base clock of 2.2GHz, which is lower than the 2.7GHz of its predecessor, but it gains the significantly higher 3.4GHz turbo mode. Cache is up 1MB, and maximum memory speed is now DDR4-2400, up from DDR4-2133. The integrated HD 620 graphics remains entirely unchanged, as it does for Kaby Lake-R parts. Oddly, even with its lower base clock, the i3-8130U’s TDP floor is higher, at 10W, than the 7.5W i3-7130U.

The essence of Intel’s 8th-gen mobile CPUs was the increasing of core counts from two to four. Their product family, Kaby Lake-R, isn’t an architectural change over Kaby Lake, which the 7th-gen Intel chips are based on. The Core i3-8130U doesn’t get the boost in core counts, so it’s purpose seems to be summed up by Intel’s press release for it: It occupies the previously vacant nameplace of the 8th-gen Core i3.