Intel's Latest Salvo Of Coffee Lake Chips Hit Retailers Early With Pricing And Specs

Intel is brewing a brand new batch of Coffee Lake processors. While nothing has been officially announced just yet, some online retailers have jumped the gun with product listings that reveal the model names of these upcoming chips, along with a few pertinent specs, such as core and thread counts, and clockspeeds. Pricing information is attached as well, though in our experience, pre-release listings tend to have inflated price tags.

That may or may not be the case here, but if you want to play it safe, we recommend waiting until Intel makes these new parts official. Either way, there are seven new SKUs in all, including two Celeron chips, two Pentium Gold CPUs, a lone Core i3 processor, and two Core i5 parts. Pricing, as it stands at the moment, ranges from $51 on the low end to $217 at the top of the new stack.

One of the vendors that lists the new processors is Provantage. The other two are PC Connection and CompuSource. Some of the listings are for individual retail boxed chips that are "in stock" while others are slightly cheaper "tray" orders, which are just the processors (no retail box or heatsink). Here's a look at the lineup:

• Core i5-8600: 6 cores / 12 threads, 3,1GHz to 4.3GHz, 9MB cache—$217
• Core i5-8500: 6 cores / 12 threads, 3.1GHz to 4.1GHz, 9MB cache—$199
• Core i3-8300: 4 cores / 4 threads, 3.7GHz, 8MB cache—$135 (tray)
• Pentium G5600: 2 cores / 4 threads, 3.9GHz—$103
• Pentium G5500: 2 cores / 4 threads, 3.7GHz—$91
• Pentium G5400: 2 cores / 4 threads, 3.2GHz, 4MB cache—$77
• Celeron G4920: 2 cores / 2 threads, 3.2GHz, 2MB cache—$62
• Celeron G4900: 2 cores / 2 threads, 3.1GHz, 2MB cache—$52

Some of the information is incomplete, such as the amount of cache on the Pentium G5600 and G5500. With the Pentium G4500 listed as having 4MB of cache, we assume the same is true of the other two parts. However, we left that information out of the chart above, since it's not on the product pages.

Assuming the above information is accurate, the Core i3-8300 could emerge as an interesting option for gamers. With four physical cores clocked at 3.7GHz supplemented with 8MB of cache, it has a fair amount of muscle, especially for the price.

In addition to a new round of Coffee Lake processors, it's expected that Intel's hardware partners will launch new and cheaper motherboards. These will include parts based on Intel's B360, H370, and H310 chipsets.