Rumor: Intel’s Coffee Lake Could Shake Up Core i3 Family

Intel hasn’t officially commented on any of its plans for the upcoming Coffee Lake family, or how much additional performance we can expect from its third-generation 14nm technology (tentatively called 14nm++). There are rumors, however, that the company will launch six-core Core i7 and Core i5 CPUs in mainstream desktops. Now we’ve seen rumors that this could extend to the Core i3 family, with possible quad-core chips arriving later this year or early next.

The CPUs pictured below are strictly rumored, courtesy of Tech Report via the Chinese forum ChinesePTT.cc. But the configurations make sense relative to what we know about Coffee Lake and AMD’s new competitive position in the market.

Image via Tech Report

If true, this would mean Intel is bringing true quad cores to the Core i3 family, a huge change from previous years when the Core i3 has been a dual-core + Hyper-Threading chip. We’re willing to entertain a rumor this weakly substantiated because we’ve seen AMD’s Ryzen take Intel’s legs out from under it in virtually every competitive comparison, either in terms of raw performance or performance-per-dollar. It’s not that Intel’s CPUs have suddenly become poor options — they often win single or lightly-threaded tests, and few people rocking a Core i7-7700K are going to rush out to buy a Ryzen 7 1800X. Nonetheless, there’s a long-term strategic threat to Intel’s desktop market, and the company is responding appropriately.

The bigger news here, I think, is Intel may finally be pushing more than two cores into the mainstream and more budget-oriented spaces. When AMD launched the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800+ back in 2005, it was an amazing CPU — but 12 years later, we’ve got far too many systems with just two CPU cores in them. Game developers have to take these configurations into account, which limits the amount of threading they’re going to implement. Granted, we know game devs are using more threads in many cases, and there’s a noticeable bump from going to Core i5 as opposed to Core i3 — but AMD’s Ryzen family is pushing more threads into the lower markets, and it’s time for Intel to follow suit.

By waiting for Coffee Lake, meanwhile, Intel ensures it can clear inventory of existing parts, while benefiting from upgrades as longtime enthusiasts opt to pick up higher-core-count CPUs on its own brand as opposed to potentially switching. Now that Ryzen has launched at its major price points, the evidence suggests Intel will play this out over the next 6-12 months as opposed to snap-launching any other major parts (upcoming Core i9 chips are a bit of an exception here). Overall, the PC market is considerably better for the competition and long-term should be friendlier to multithreaded workloads and gaming as well.