More notebooks sporting Intel 8th generation CPUs spotted through benchmark listings

2017 is already more than halfway over to bring us one step closer to Intel's upcoming 8th generation of CPUs. It's now looking more likely that the chipmaker will make an official announcement regarding the Kaby Lake successor this September at IFA 2017 in Berlin.

Marketing Confusion: Cannonlake, Coffee Lake, or Kaby Lake Refresh?

There's no doubt that manufacturers will market the 14 nm Kaby Lake successor as "8th generation Core i3/i5/i7", but the original successor to Kaby Lake, called Cannonlake, was supposed to be the 8th generation CPU series fabricated using a brand new 10 nm process. Since this has now been delayed, Intel has interjected the Coffee Lake series in between Kaby Lake and Cannonlake as yet another 14 nm refresh to Skylake in order to buy more time for the difficult transition to 10 nm chips.

Because of the reasons above, one can argue that Coffee Lake is more of a half-step "7.5 generation Core i3/i5/i7" instead of the full-on generational leap over Kaby Lake.

Kaby Lake Refresh: Quad-core in Mainstream

Regardless of the confusing naming conventions, the upcoming Kaby Lake successor for notebooks will likely only appear as 15 W TDP processors designed specifically for Ultrabooks. After all, the marketing potential of selling newly-refreshed Ultrabooks alongside Intel's sparkly next generation of processors would look great to general consumers.

One interesting facet of the upcoming ULV Coffee Lake CPU is the potential for mainstream quad-core options. The current Core i5-7200U, for example, is limited to two cores and four threads while the rumored Core i5-8250U could sport four cores and eight threads. New unverified benchmark entries now show the i5-8250U running at lower base clock rates of 1.6 to 1.8 GHz while the i7-8550U and i7-8650U could be as low as 2 GHz each. The slower clock rates compared to current ULV Kaby Lake options are expected when given the same 15 W TDP envelope.

First Coffee Lake Notebooks Appear Online

Benchmark entries in PassMark, CPUBenchmark, and Geekbench databases may have revealed the first batch of notebooks sporting Intel 8th generation CPUs. Example include the Lenovo Yoga 720-13IKBR as the successor to the Yoga 720-13IKB, the HP ProBook 440 G5 as the successor to the ProBook 440 G4, the Asus ZenBook UX340UAR as the successor to the ZenBook UX330 series, and new Spectre x360 and Dell XPS 13 SKUs.

We already spotted a potentially new Acer Swift 3 earlier this week set to ship with the Core i5-8250U as well as the new GeForce MX150.

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