Intel’s been sitting on his desktop Coffee Lake parts since the arrival of AMD Ryzen, but ahead of an expected October 5th launch, the first benchmarks have leaked for its flagship Intel Core i7-8700K. Predictably it’s got the previous gen Core i7-7700K beat, both in terms of performance efficiency, single thread, and multithreaded performance.

The 8th Gen Coffee Lake chip is a hexa-core with 12 threads and an expected base clock speed of 3.7GHz, boost clock of 4.7 GHz, and six-core max speeds of 4.3GHz.

The first benchmarks come by way of tech journo Karl Morin, who attended DreamHack 2017 and found an HP Envy system loaded up with Intel’s latest processor. He somehow proceeded to bench it right there on the show floor in from the HP representative.

In Cinebench R15 the Intel Core i7-8700K scored 196 points in single-threaded and 1230 in multi-threaded performance.

This makes the i7-8700K the fastest ever Cinebench R15 single-threaded CPU at stock clocks, just about outscoring the previous generation i7-7700K, which garnered 192 points. The gulf in class is more pronounced on multi-threaded performance, no doubt down to those two additional cores, scoring 1230 vs the 950 achieved by a stock clock 7700K.

As for CPU-Z benchmarks, this tells a similar tale. The Intel Core i7-8700K squeezes out both the Core i7-7700K and the Ryzen 7 1800X on single-threaded performance and yet falls short of AMD’s CPU when it comes to multithreading thanks to the two additional cores on the 1800X. An important thing to consider with the Intel Core i7-8700K is just how it’s going to stack up against AMD’s current flagship - the Ryzen 7 1800X. AMD’s CPU scores just 156 points in single-threaded Cinebench R15 performance, yet manages a massive score of 1600 for multi-threaded.

Cinebench R15 Single-Thread Cinebench R15 Multithread CPU-Z Single-Thread CPU-Z Multithread Intel Core i7-8700K 196 1230 2243 13680 Ryzen 7 1800X 156 1600 2162 19209 Intel Core i7-7700K 192 950 2235 9537

In summation, Intel’s got AMD beat when it comes to single-threaded performance, offering a significant advantage. When it comes to multi-threaded performance though, AMD’s high core count keeps Ryzen afloat.

Still no confirmation from Intel on precisely when the Core i7-8700K and the rest of the desktop Coffee Lake series will launch, although rumours persist it will be on October 5th.