Coffee Lake hexa-core Core i9 mobile options rumored for H1 2018

While we know Intel will be launching proper Coffee Lake hexa-core options to supplant the current 45 W HQ-class of Kaby Lake quad-core processors, the exact SKUs and their details remain largely unknown. Intel has yet to officially comment on hexa-core processors for notebooks, but sources close to AnandTech have revealed some unconfirmed key specifications on specific models.

Accordingly, the initial family of mobile 45 W Coffee Lake-H CPUs will consist of the i3-8300H, i5-8400H, i7-8750H, i7-8550H, and i9-8950HK. The series will follow the desktop Coffee Lake-H variants more closely as the i3, i5, and i7 mobile models will be quad-core, hexa-core, and hexa-core with Hyper-Threading, respectively. If true, then the mobile 45 W Core i5 series will continue to lack Hyper-Threading in contrast to the 15 W Core i5 U-class Kaby Lake-R family of processors.

Lastly, the Core i9-8950HK seems be the unlocked version of the mobile H-series similar to the Kaby Lake i7-7820HK or Skylake i7-6820HK. In essentially all of our notebooks equipped with these HK-class of processors, however, the base performance gains over the i7-7700HQ or i7-6700HQ are within just single-digit percentages each time. If the Core i9-8950HK is of any indication - and we believe that it is since it carries the same number of cores and threads as the Core i7 series - then we can probably expect minimal raw performance gains yet again over the i7-8750H and i7-8550H.

The mobile Coffee Lake-H series should be shipping in the next generation of gaming notebooks early next year and it may even have a presence at CES 2018 in January. We recommend checking out the source article for more information on the leaked Coffee Lake desktop processors as well.

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