Coffee Lake Refresh: Octa Core Laptop CPUs will likely be released in early 2019

It wasn't a long time ago that progress in the PC space was very slow. For years, quad core processors were the fastest chips that Intel offered for its mainstream customers. The overwhelming majority of laptops sold was even still powered by dual core chips just a year ago.

Since last years Kaby Lake Refresh CPUs there is some movement in the market, as Intel transitioned its mainstream Ultrabook CPUs to a four core design. A similar move happened this year with Intels higher end processors, the new generation of which are called "Coffee Lake". With Coffee Lake, Intel moved some of these 45 W CPUs from quad core to hexa core. The new six core chips are powering many new gaming, workstation and popular premium laptops, like the Dell XPS 15.

But ultimately, the hexa core processors are seemingly just a smaller step, as Intel is preparing its next CPU generation for 2019. In the desktop and high-end mobile segments, those chips will carry the code-name "Coffee Lake Refresh" and according to several sources, this generation will include the first octa core CPUs. For example, wccftech reports on a Core i9-9900K with eight CPU cores for the desktop market. Also, the Japanese site PC-Watch has published informations about the mobile "Coffee Lake Refresh H CPU", which are expected to be released in early 2019 – with the first octa core CPUs for laptops.

Why has Intel accelerated the development of mobile octa core CPUs? The reason might be simply that Intel sees no other way to fend off a resurgent AMD (thanks to Ryzen), as Intels production of 10 nm CPUs is still in very bad shape.

Source(s)