Intel is one of the top processor manufacturers and you may have bought a laptop that is powered by either their Atom, Celeron or Core branded chips.
For a very long time, their highest end chips for the laptop segment has always been the Core i7 where the top Core i7 chips have 4 cores and were found on expensive laptops. However, last year they announced the Core i9 for desktops and it was only a matter of time for them to announce them for the mobile chips (read laptops.)
Today, Intel has announced that they are bringing over the Core i9 branding over to the laptop space and it is quite exciting. The new Core i9 chips are being fabricated on the Coffee Lake platform, which is the same 14nm++ technology like the other 8th Gen chips.
The top Core i9 chipset in this family for laptops is the Core i9-8950HK which has 6 cores and 12 threads and crazy enough it can turbo boost upto 4.8 Ghz. Intel says this chip can deliver upto 41% more frames per second in gameplay and can edit 4K video ut 59% faster than the previous 7th generation chip (Core i7 7820HK). This looks like the perfect fit for that consumer who either does video editing and also games on the side, which is great news!
Along with the announcement of the new Core i9 chips, Intel also announced new Core i7 ad i5 processors for laptops on the same Coffee Lake platform. This might be confusing since last year Intel announced the ‘Kaby Lake refresh’ which were also termed as 8th Gen.
Intel also brought over Intel Optane memory support over to mobile with the 8th Gen chips. Intel Optane memory is the company’s solution which includes cache memory that is used to speed up slow hard drives that you find in laptops.
Expect the Core i9 chip to appear in this year’s top of the line laptops, which includes gaming laptops from the various manufacturers as well as Apple with their Macbook Pro line.
