The rumor mill is abuzz with uncorroborated reports of Intel Coffee Lake processor sightings. After all the leaks we’ve seen so far this year (we heard them in advance of Intel’s Kaby Lake, AMD’s Vega, AMD’s Ryzen, and Nvidia’s Volta to name a few), this comes as no surprise.

In our quest to get beyond CPU Z screenshots and random charts on the internet, which we’re all aware can easily be faked, we did spot something very interesting. According to this SiSoftware Official Live Ranker submission, it appears that someone has benchmarked an unknown CPU that bears all the characteristics of an Intel Coffee Lake hexacore CPU.

First of all, the processor is listed as a “Genuine Intel CPU 0000 @ 3.10GHz (6C 12T 3.1GHz/4.2GHz, 2.7GHz IMC/3.9GHz, 6x 256kB L2, 12MB L3).” That in itself isn’t proof of a Coffee Lake processor. The “CPU 0000” could simply be an error with the benchmark’s ability to identify the CPU. So, although this benchmark result identifies a 6C/12T processor with 6x 256k L2 cache, and 12MB L3, there is still no concrete proof of a Coffee Lake CPU.

But we dug further into the benchmark results and noticed, under the Computer/Device listing, that the video adapter was listed as “Intel Coffee Lake UHD Graphics” and the general processor was listed as “Intel Cofee Lake Mobile Graphics.” Again, this isn’t positive proof of a Coffee Lake processor but it would be pretty difficult to fake the hardware ID for a processor’s embedded graphics.

All of the above leads us to believe that the SiSoftware benchmark results we are looking at could in fact be genuine. The benchmarks’ originator and the benchmark conditions are still a mystery.

For now, all we know is that Intel’s Coffee Lake family of desktop processors are expected to launch sometime in the second half of 2017, and that it's built on a third-gen 14nm (14nm++) process. Given that Intel has, until this year, held its annual developer conference in the August timeframe (the company is now focused on smaller, more targeted events), the timing of the leaks (and possible release) also isn’t a big surprise. Sources have been telling us for weeks that Coffee Lake is coming before the summer ends.