Coffee Lake

Coffee Lake is Intel's codename for the second 14 nm process refinement following Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake.^[2] The integrated graphics on Coffee Lake chips allow support for DP 1.2 to HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 connectivity. Coffee Lake natively supports DDR4-2666 MHz memory in dual channel mode when used with Xeon, Core i5, i7 and i9 CPUs, DDR4-2400 MHz memory in dual channel mode when used with Celeron, Pentium, and Core i3 CPUs, and LPDDR3-2133 MHz memory when used with mobile CPUs.

Desktop Coffee Lake CPUs introduces major changes in Intel's Core CPUs nomenclature, in that i5 and i7 CPUs feature six cores (along with hyper-threading in the case of the latter). Core i3 CPUs, having four cores and dropping hyper-threading for the first time, received a change as well. The 9th generation release in October 2018 further changed the nomenclature, with Core i7 moving to 8 cores and dropping hyper-threading for the first time, and new mainstream desktop Core i9 processors being released, featuring 8 cores with hyper-threading.

The chips were released on October 5, 2017.^[1] Coffee Lake is used in conjunction with the 300-series chipset, and officially does not work with the 100- and 200-series chipset motherboards. Although desktop Coffee Lake processors use the same physical LGA 1151 socket as Skylake and Kaby Lake, the pinout is electrically incompatible with these older processors and motherboards.^[3]

On April 2, 2018, Intel released additional desktop Core i3, i5, i7, Pentium Gold, Celeron CPUs and for the first time in its history six-core Core i7 and i9 mobile CPUs as well as hyper-threaded four-core Core i5 mobile CPUs, and the first Coffee Lake ultra-power CPUs with Intel Iris Plus graphics.

On October 8, 2018, Intel launched Coffee Lake Refresh 9th generation Intel Core CPUs, with Core i9-9900K leading the launch.^[4]

Features

Coffee Lake CPUs are built using the second refinement of Intel's 14 nm process (14++).^[2] It features increased transistor gate pitch for a lower current density and higher leakage transistors which allows higher peak power and higher frequency at the expense of die area and idle power.

Coffee Lake marks a shift in the number of cores for Intel's mainstream desktop processors, the first such update for the previous ten-year history of Intel Core CPUs. In the 8th generation, mainstream desktop i7 CPUs feature six cores and 12 threads, i5 CPUs feature six single-threaded cores and i3 CPUs feature four single-threaded cores.

Chipsets

The 300 series chipsets, while using physically identical LGA 1151 socket to the 100 and 200 series chipsets, are officially only compatible with Coffee Lake CPUs, meaning that older motherboards do not officially support Coffee Lake processors^[6][3], and 300 series motherboards do not officially support Skylake or Kaby Lake processors.

The enthusiast Z370 (a rebranded Z270), launched alongside the first Coffee Lake CPUs in October of 2017, was the only officially supported chipset for these mainstream CPUs. When the full lineup of CPUs was revealed in April of 2018, it was then accompanied by lower-end H310, B360, H370 and Q370 chipsets for home and business users. A new Z390 chipset was introduced alongside the release of the 9th generation CPUs, supporting all 8th and 9th generation mainstream desktop parts.

Architecture changes compared to Kaby Lake

Coffee Lake features largely the same CPU core and performance per MHz as Skylake/Kaby Lake.^[7][8] Features specific to Coffee Lake include:

• Increased core count to six cores on Core i5 and 8th generation i7 parts; Core i3 is now a quad-core brand. 9th generation i7 and i9 parts feature eight cores.
• Increased L3 cache in accordance to the number of threads
• Increased turbo clock speeds across i5 and i7 CPUs models (increased by up to 400 MHz)
• Increased iGPU clock speeds by 50 MHz and rebranded it UHD (Ultra High Definition)
• DDR4 memory support updated for 2666 MHz (for i5, i7 and i9 parts) and 2400 MHz (for i3 parts); DDR3 memory is no longer supported on LGA1151 parts
• 300 series chipset on the second revision of socket LGA 1151

Kaby Lake Refresh vs. Coffee Lake

On August 8, 2017, Intel announced that new eighth generation of processors would be revealed the following August 21.^[9] As Intel's previous changes in product generations coincided with new microarchitectures, it was unclear^[10] but generally expected that the eighth Core generation products would be based on the new Coffee Lake microarchitecture.^[11] However, when it was officially announced on August 21, 2017, Intel stated that the eighth generation would be based on multiple microarchitectures, including Kaby Lake,^[12] Coffee Lake, and Cannonlake.^[13]

Additional core resources in mid-range eighth-generation Coffee Lake desktop chips offer significant gains in performance versus previous seventh-generation Intel CPUs in multi-threaded workloads. However, the architecture delivers no IPC difference over Skylake or Kaby Lake.^[14]

List of 8th generation Coffee Lake processors

List of 9th generation Coffee Lake processors

See also

• List of Intel CPU microarchitectures

References

External links

• "Products formerly Coffee Lake". Intel. Archived from the original on 2017-10-05. Retrieved 2017-10-19.