2017 has been a great year for CPU releases so far. The Intel 7th generation Kaby Lake platform debuted in late 2016 (with wide availability in early 2017) and has since been the staple of many laptops and desktops. AMD, after a longer than usual pause, demoed its Zen-architecture based Ryzen chips starting with the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X, which was received very well by both consumers and the press for its good price-to-performance ratio. There has been a lot of buzz in the High End Desktop (HEDT) segment as well, both with AMD unleashing the Threadripper 1950X with a massive 16-core/32-thread configuration and Intel revealing the Skylake-X (Core i9-7900X) and Kaby Lake-X (Core i7-7740X) CPUs in a variety of SKUs. Even in the server segment, AMD's EPYC and Intel's Skylake-SP are all set to bring high-end computing to datacenters worldwide.

In the midst of all these developments, Intel has announced the next iteration of its CPUs — the 8th generation Cores. However, unlike earlier where each generation brought with it an underlying architectural or lithography change, the new 8th generation CPUs will be an assortment of multiple micro-architectures. Intel's processor nomenclature can be somewhat bewildering for those uninitiated and the new generation takes this confusion a notch up further: The 8th generation Intel CPUs will have a refreshed Kaby Lake lineup called the Kaby Lake-R (14nm+), which includes the 15W U-processor family, Coffee Lake (14nm++), which is purported to include the K-processor family from 65W to to 95W TDP, and Canon Lake (10nm). The first of the 8th generation CPUs, the Kaby Lake-R was unveiled on August 21 with the launch of the Core i5-8250U, Core i5-8350U, Core i7-8550U and Core i7-8650U. All these processors are of the 15W TDP type (though TDP is configurable by the OEM) and, unlike their previous 7th generation counterparts, they now feature quad cores with hyperthreading.

Intel has managed to retain the TDP at 15W by reducing the base clock of these processors. While the 7th gen Core i5-7200U clocked a 2.5 GHz base and 3.1 GHz turbo, the new 8th gen equivalent Core i5-8250U clocks a 1.6 GHz base with a 3.4 GHz turbo. Despite the lower base clocks, there should not be a major performance hit in notebooks incorporating the new 8th generation chips for routine workloads (Office, web browsing, and very light gaming) given the turbo clock is still the same as the previous generation. However, how OEMs implement these chips and what sort of throttling measures they incorporate remains to be seen.

In terms of the integrated GPU, there is only a change in the way Intel addresses the name. Technically, it is still the same Intel HD Graphics 620 that is found in the 7th generation Kaby Lake CPUs but Intel has decided to change the branding to "UHD Graphics" to better convey the 4K/HEVC decoding that the iGPU is capable of. It is still the Gen9.2/GT2 engine as the previous generation but it now comes with native support for HDCP 2.2. Therefore, the GPU part is relatively unchanged, and for the most part, Intel has limited its tinkering to the CPU side.

Overall, the company claims that the new generation will have a 40% performance improvement over Kaby Lake. With some of the recent notebook launches at IFA 2017 featuring 8th generation Intel CPUs and getting our own sample from Acer, we were able to get an idea of how exactly the new chips perform.