In the semi-conductor industry, Moore’s law has been used to predict the performance of the next generation of processor chips. It was accurate for several decades until around 2012 where we reached the 22nm node process and the performance stated slowing down.
Currently, Intel is shipping the 7th Generation Intel Core processors that are on desktops and laptops alike. They are based on the 14nm process just like the 6th generation but they only had a slight performance gain over them, which is expected since we are reaching saturation of Moore’s law.
However, with the upcoming 8th Gen chips, Intel seems to have eked out more performance from them than expected, which is good news! Intel highlighted the good news today at Computex that the new 8th gen processors will perform 30% better than the 7th gen processors, which is double what we have grown accustomed to.
This is interesting since Intel had earlier said that the new chips would only be 15% more powerful than the 7th gen chips, which has been the expected trend. The 30% figure was based on a benchmark (Sysmark) that was applied to ultrabook 15W U series processors. The benchmark was done between the Intel Core i7-7500U (dual core) versus the next gen chip.
Apparently the new chip has a 4Ghz turbo, an unspecified base clock speed and has 4 cores/8 threads on the third refinement of the 14nm process. Intel is committed to deliver the 8th gen chips (codenamed Coffee Lake) by the holiday season, so maybe we will see devices running these chips early next year. If you are enthusiast, you can just drool over the newly announced Core i9 chips Intel announced today.
