Vietnamese Retailer Leaks Some Intel 9000-Series Coffee Lake Refresh CPUs

We’ve spoken here at AnandTech several times on the upcoming Z390 chipset and also a few words on new processors for those motherboards. Intel has promised a new consumer-grade launch this year, so we are patiently waiting for more information. As it turns out, some retailers get that itch early – in this case, a Vietnamese retailer has listed five processors for sale.

There are several key points to gather from the table.

Intel doesn't seem to like multithreading anymore: when the product stack had multithreading and went up to four cores, it was easy to segment. When six core processors came along, there was a mix between 6C/6T parts in some tests being outperformed by 4C/8T parts that were cheaper. The best way to eliminate that issue is to either make all parts have HT, or none of them. Intel has gone for the latter across its stack, except at the high-end with the 8-core part. This might also have something to do with recent side channel attacks, which can take advantage of HT. Removing HT removes the attack vector, although has a knock-on effect in performance.

Intel is moving up to 8-cores: as promised, Intel is bringing 8-cores to the mainstream to compete against AMD’s 8-core Ryzen parts that have been on the market for over a year. Intel will use the Core i7 brand for 8C/8T processors, like the i7-9700K, and then the Core i9 brand for 8C/16T processors like the i9-9900K.

Cache is a commodity: For the 9000-series, it would appear that only the Core i9 will get the full 2 MB L3 cache per core, while all the others get only 1.5 MB L3 cache per core. This will have a knock-on effect as this cache is an inclusive cache, which keeps a full record of L2. In the previous generation, All Core i7 parts had a full 2 MB L3 per cache, as well as the Core i3-8350K and Core i3-8300 series.

Ignore TDP if you want Turbo: As stated several times in the past, Intel's use of TDP only refers to power consumption at the base frequency. It's going to be interesting to see how much power these chips draw under turbo.

Prices were not listed on the leak, and instead users have to contact the retailer. Memory support appears to be DDR4-2666 for all parts except Core i3. Also, all the parts are listed as Coffee Lake Refresh, using a 14nm class process.

Source: Hanoi Computer

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