Coffee Lake Official Announcement. Release Date & Pricing.

So finally we have gotten some official word out of camp Intel, and it looks like a lot of the leaks/rumors are true. We already knew that the core count rumors from a while back were true, but now we also have found out that the release date is indeed the 5th of October, a little over a week away. Not only that, but we no longer need to speculate on pricing, as Intel has also revealed the cost. Alas, that is not fully true, as Americans no longer have to speculate on pricing, but over here we do, yet as the the cost in dollars is typically very close to the cost in Pounds, when you bring in tax etc., all we have to do is convert the Pounds to Euros and Bob's your uncle we have a decent estimate. So, I would estimate you are looking at a new i7 8700K for about €410/£360.

So, with so many leaks and rumors that are all saying the same thing, I guess Intel thought they may as well make if official. You can read the official Intel Newsroom Article HERE and the press brief HERE. Some of Intel's chosen "Highlights":

Featuring Intel's Best Ever Gamign Processor EVER!!

The new i7 8700K is capable of 4.7 GHz maximum single-core turbo frequency, the highest frequency ever from Intel thanks to Turbo Boost 2.0, making it a performance powerhouse for both single and multi-threaded applications, but remember that unless you overclock, not all cores will achieve this speed, although some leaks are pointing towards this being a fairly straight forward task. So the above statement is probably true, and I do think that this will be one of the biggest jumps in performance per generation in a long time, possibly stretching as back as the last ten years, although I dislike that they don't give any hard numbers to look at when it comes to this statement. See ² below.  

Now all of these numbers they do give are very impressive, 25% more FPS over the 7700k when it comes to gaming sounds massive, but it's also a very vague statement; is this at 1080p? Quad HD? 4k? What graphics settings? Well, that figure is pulled from only one game, Gears of War 4 Benchmark mode, so it's hardly a comprehensive indication of gaming performance. Remember, not all games are born equal, some like Gears of War 4 have excellent multi threading, meaning they can make use out of lots, if not all, of your CPU workers (cores/threads), while many others are optimized to only run off the fastest worker, so it doesn't matter if you have 2, 4, 6 or even 18 cores, that game will only make use of the one. This is why you should take this statement with a grain of salt, yes this CPU has 2 more cores and out of the box it has a higher turbo clock out of the box than the 7700K, but not all games will be able to make use out of them 2 extra cores; remember that most people who buy the unlocked "K" version are not going to have the CPU running at stock, so it's easy to ignore stock clock values when talking about "K" processors. 

Onto the 65% faster editing, this again is in the same vein as the previous statement; it is a cherry picked result based on a single program so do remember to take all press releases with a healthy dose of skepticism. Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that the 8700K is the better processor and I would advice anyone looking to buy a Custom PC now to wait till the 5th till we get the option of Coffee Lake, rather, my point here is don't believe all the hype and wait for independent reviews that will use more than one cherry picked benchmark from one game. If you have an i7 from the past two generations, unless you can sell on your old parts for decent value, this will probably not be a worthwhile upgrade as there is no backwards compatibility when it comes to motherboards even though they are the same socket (1151). There are only 9 days until release, then the NDA is lifted and we be flooded with independent reviews. Below is the small print Intel have listed beside each of these figures.

So, we have had rumors and leaks over pricing, but now we have the official numbers; below is a slide from Intel's press release containing all the pricing information you can expect. Still no "Official" Europe or UK price, but we can guesstimate it, as I found that the listed un-taxed US price typically equals the vat inclusive UK price closet to the nearest £5, then we can just convert at the standard rate to find out what it will cost in euros. 

Using my very un-sophisticated method, here is my best guesstimate on the pricing we will be looking at. I would hope these are accurate to ±€20/£15.

Now, I would hope my estimates here a tad high, and would hope the i7 8700K will be under the €400 mark, regardless it will be the new king of gaming CPUs. Looking down that list we still have some very tasty looking processors, a 4 core i3 and 6 core i5 are particularly attractive, specifically the i6 8400, a 6 core i5 that could yet come in under €200. That will be some serous competition for Ryzen 5. My only hope is that they also bring out a Pentium that brought as much value to the table as the G4560, although I don't expect as big a leap in performance that hyper-threading brought to the Pentium table.

Maybe controversy is a bit too big of a word as we really should be used to these sort of shady practices when it comes to Intel and making money. For those of you who are not very into their tech knowledge, all CPUs fit into a "socket" on the motherboard, and these sockets are specially designed to fit the shape and pin configuration of the corresponding CPU, much like your wall sockets at home are designed to fit our standard 3 pin plug. Typically Intel change these socket shapes as the technology improves to match their latest CPU shape for many reasons, one no doubt, is to make sure they make as much money as possible by forcing us to buy a new motherboard along with our new processor.

To be fair, this doesn't happen at every new generation of CPU,as  last year we seen both Sky Lake and Kaby Lake fit the 1151 socket, and with a BIOS update Kaby Lake could be used on the older 200 series chip-set designed for skylake. The controversy surrounding coffee lake comes from the fact that it has been confirmed to be also running with the 1151 socket but will have no backwards compatibility, meaning even though the CPU will fit these older motherboards, they wont work which leaves owners of Sky Lake or Kaby Lake setups without the easy upgrade path of simply getting a new CPU.  Below are some quotes from Intel on the topic:

Now these all sound like fairly valid reasons, but when we look at the top end Z170/270 mother boards they already have very high end power delivery, and as such there are a lot of doubters over the legitimacy of Intel's reasoning, never mind the fact of whether the new Z370 boards will even have any improvements over the older generation in regards to Intel's quoted concerns. They also give no reason why quad-core Kabylake-S would not work on Z370, after all it is the same socket and should have no problem with power delivery or memory controllers, since it is designed to work with the much more demanding Coffee Lake. The other major complaint people have is that this is an older socket, it has no where else to go, meaning if you buy into Coffee Lake now you have no where to go next year as it is very unlikely that the 9th gen comes out on the same socket.

Lack of Cheaper Motherboards

The problems don't stop there, although Intel have confirmed that the non "K" CPUs are also due out on the 5th, I'm talking about the 8700, 8400 and 8100; there has been no confirmation on the release of lower priced motherboards, so far we only know that the Z370 boards will be out for release and it looks like there will be no B360/H370 motherboards coming this year. Basically, the only option you have is Z370 which is wasting money on enthusiast class hardware that you have to pay a premium for and then not be able to use any of the features. The only sliver lining for people looking to do budget Coffee Lake builds for Christmas is that they have a decent upgrade path up the 8th gen series in the future.

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