Intel confirms the existence of the Core i7 processor in last year's mysterious MacBook Air-like device

Last year, an unknown device with the same motherboard as the MacBook Air 2018 appeared on Geekbench with what purported to be an unreleased Intel Core i7 processor. Now, an intrepid person on Twitter has found an Intel product change notification (PCN) document that makes explicit to that chip, which the company is calling the Core i7-8510Y.

According to Geekbench, the CPU will have two cores and can execute up to four threads simultaneously, which means that it must support Intel Hyper-Threading. Moreover, the processor can clock up to 1.8 GHz, which is 200 MHz increase over the Core i5-8210Y in last year's MacBook Air. Both chips share the same amount of L1, L2 and L3 caches though.

The Core i7-8510Y appears only to offer a modest performance improvement in multi-core applications as demonstrated by the Geekbench scores. However, we suspect that these are not final scores as the former scored around 5% worse in the single-core portion of Geekbench than the Core i5-8210Y despite having a nominally higher clock speed.

The PCN document also refers to the Core i5-8310Y, which may be a new series for Intel. We doubt that it will succeed the Core i5-8210Y with which Apple equipped last year's MacBook Air because Intel tends to distinguish its processors in denominations of 10 rather than 100. We have no other information on the Core i5-8310Y processor though, so it remains to be seen how the chip will fit within Intel's existing product range.