We’ve had a lot of Intel news over the last 24 hours and while we have managed to tackle the bigger announcements, there was one small but interesting detail that snuck by during the Intel conference at Computex. In the midst of the big reveal for X299 and Skylake-X, Intel began talking about its future 8th generation CPUs, promising a 30 percent performance increase and availability before the end of the year.

Intel’s upcoming 8th generation CPUs are currently code-named ‘Coffee Lake’ and during the press briefing, Intel claimed that while engineers were initially planning on a 15 percent performance improvement over 7th gen. However, it seems that the competitive landscape has now caused this to be bumped up to a 30 percent improvement.

A 30 percent performance boost would be a very impressive generational bump, particularly given that yearly performance improvements have generally sat in the 10 to 15 percent range for the last few years.

Aside from that, Intel says that great progress has been made with 8th gen already, so the company plans on having the first Coffee Lake CPUs out by the end of 2017, both in laptop and desktop form. For laptops, it is likely that we will see low-power U-series chips first, alongside OEM availability of some Coffee Lake CPUs some time before we get around to the 8600K or 8800K though. The usual Core i7s and Core i5s that the average custom PC builder can go out and buy will likely arrive later in the first half of 2018. This release timetable would be similar to what we observed with Kaby Lake last year.

KitGuru Says: A 30 percent generational leap certainly isn’t anything to scoff at. It will certainly keep things in the CPU market interesting as we edge closer to 2018.

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