Eurocom says Intel will have an 8C/16T 'enthusiast' consumer CPU by late 2018

Yesterday, a Eurocom company representative responded to a thread on the NotebookReview forums which was asking about whether their Tornado F5 and not-yet-released Tornado F7 would be compatible with Coffee Lake, or if it a Coffee Lake variant would be offered. Their response was “We are planning to update Tornado F5 to Z390 chipset supporting 8C/16T CPUs coming in H2/18. We will launch F7 at the same time too. We will skip z370 chipset. Meantime we added support for Quadro P5000 and P3000.”

Since the Tornado F5 utilizes a desktop CPU socket, and the Z-series are “enthusiast” desktop based chipsets, this information tells us that Intel's standard desktop line-up will have an 8-core / 16-thread desktop-enthusiast processor available in the second half of 2018. Kaby Lake has four cores at the desktop enthusiast level, and currently known Coffee Lake CPUs will have up to six cores. As a side note, the post also confirms that Eurocom will release the anticipated Tornado F7 in the later part of 2018.

This unconfirmed CPU could be in the 9th generation 'Ice Lake' family, which the Intel Codename Decoder recently started outputting information on: “The Ice Lake processor family is a successor to the 8th generation Intel® Core™ processor family. These processors utilize Intel’s industry-leading 10 nm+ process technology.” Alternatively, based on this desktop roadmap and this mobile roadmap, the release timing means it could just be a high-end variation of 14nm Coffee Lake.

The core and thread count aren't official until announced by Intel, but OEMs and ODMs often receive information about upcoming CPU releases at an earlier stage than media or consumers to have products ready for release.

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