Leaks and rumors regarding Intel Coffee Lake have been making rounds for past few weeks. From what we heard so far, the 8th-gen desktop chips would arrive in August alongside the new Z370 motherboards. But, a recent statement from board makers claiming otherwise, saying the launch isn’t going to happen until the end of the year.

Coffee Lake Z370 Motherboards to arrive in Q4

At Computex 2017 last month, Intel unveiled its new high-end desktop (HEDT) Core X-Series processors and X299 platform. As reported by PCGamesN, during the X299 launch party, a company representative confirmed new Z370 motherboards would hit the market with Coffee Lake in the fourth quarter of this year.

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“Some of you might have heard from many resources that Intel will launch Z370,” he says. “But it will be in Q4, I’m supposed not to say it… Please focus on Z270,” said the sales rep.

The Z370 chipset will offer enhanced functionality, such as integrated USB 3.1 Gen 2 support and Gigabit Wi-Fi. Furthermore, it is broadly expected that the Coffee Lake processors won’t be backwards compatible with the 200-series of motherboards which launched at the start of the year with Kaby Lake.

Intel Coffee Lake featuring 6-core CPUs to rival AMD Ryzen 5

Intel Coffee Lake will see the introduction of the company’s first 6-core mainstream CPUs. One of the chips was spotted in the Geekbench last week, featuring 12 threads clocked at 3.19GHz. It has 1.5 MB of L2 and 12 MB of L3 cache, with a TDP rating of 81.2W.

In terms of performance, the Coffee Lake 6-core CPU is on par with AMD Ryzen 5 1600X. You can find the Coffee Lake CPU performance here.

Intel’s 8th-gen chips will retain the same basic CPU and graphics architectures as the existing Kaby Lake chips, but will utilize an optimized 14nm++ process technology. This should offer over 15% increase in performance over the current generation.

According to a previous Intel roadmap, the first Coffee Lake chips will include the 4-core and 6-core K-series desktop parts with TDP ratings of 65 and 95 watts. The launch will be accompanied by Intel’s brand-new Z370 chipset.

Coffee Lake will be followed by Intel’s first 10nm Core processors, code named Cannon Lake. The 10nm CPUs are scheduled to land in our PCs sometime in 2018, delivering up to 25% performance boost over Kaby Lake.