Intel is bringing out its priciest and most powerful Core i9 processors for the laptop. While its seventh-generation processors were not much improvement over their predecessor, the latest Intel chips, it appears, are here to change the game. With the i9, Intel aims to bring desktop, hexa core power to gaming laptops and prosumer devices.
“As the PC gaming industry rapidly grows, Intel has seen increasing demand for incredibly fast laptops that can provide desktop-like performance for an immersive and responsive experience, including the ability to stream and record without compromising gameplay while still enabling portability,” the chip maker said in a press release.
The new Core i9-8950HK processor is the first Core i9 chip for the laptop. Intel touts it to be 29% faster in routine tasks compared to one of last year’s fastest laptop CPU. According to the chipmaker, the processor is also 59% quicker at 4k video editing than the Core i7-7820HK chip as well.
Intel’s Core i9 would come unlocked meaning it can be overclocked. According to the company, the PC manufacturers would start shipping pre-overclocked 5GHz+systems shortly after the launch.
“It’s the fastest gaming processor we’ve ever launched,” said Fredrik Hamberger, general manager of Intel’s premium and gaming notebooks, according to PCWorld. “It really is the closest to desktop performance you can get in a notebook.” The company is still to announce the pricing, but given the fact, there is just one chip in the lineup, it could well be for the high-end gaming computers.
In addition to the Core i9 processors, Intel also announced i5 and i7 processors for the laptops. Both the chips are based on the company’s 14nm++ architecture – popularly known as Coffee Lake – instead of the eight-generation Kaby Lake R chips, which were a muscled version of the same 14nm+ architecture of the seventh-generation chips.
All newly released chips, Intel’s i9, i7 and i5 Coffee Lake chips are part of the H-series lineup. Chips such as Radeon RX Vega M processors are suitable for the thinner and lightweight laptops preferred by the companies that want to mainlain less space. However, Intel’s Coffee Lake chips are for the top computers.
With the Coffee Lake H and U series, the chipmaker wants to improve the experience of gamers, as well as general users respectively. The H series Core processors bring hexa-core design to the Core i7 chips. The hexa-core CPU would allow efficient management of multiple units.
Intel’s Coffee Lake U series chip is two times more powerful than 8th generation Kaby Lake R with more quad-core chips that can reach 2.3 GHz to 3.0 GHz and cache size from 4MB to 8MB. Compared to the Core i5 8400U processor, this chip is 2.5 times more responsive and 2.1 times faster when it comes to office productivity compared to the five-year-old system. According to TechRadar, the new U-series also integrates updated Iris Plus graphics.
Having “more cores” is definitely new mantra this season irrespective of desktop or laptop processors. Though the chipmaker is continuing its Core i7/Core i5/Core i3 designations, consumers are getting more cores now. Intel’s low-power U-series Core i5 chips would come with four cores and eight threads for laptops. For the desktop, Intel’s low-power Core i3 chips have four cores while Core i5 has six, notes CNET.
Two H series processors and both M series Xeon CPUs are built on Intel’s VPro technology. The said technology helps the chipmaker to perform better allowing IT departments to easily manage the device, even remotely. Also, these chips would more likely be the preferred choice of big professional workstation laptops like Dell’s Precision line up, Lenovo ThinkPad and HP’s Zbooks, notes Gizmodo.
Apart from the speed and efficiency, Intel has brought its Optane high-speed memory to laptops through both direct Optane SSD for laptops such as Optane SSD 800p, as well as Optane hybrid drives for disk drives paired with SSDs. The new memory results in 1.3 times better data writing performance along with retrieval related tasks and 4.7 times faster level loading in games, the chip maker claims.
For those who can’t keep up with the alphabet soup of letters used by Intel to differentiate between its processors, letters like H, K, U and so on denote the crucial trait of a processor. For instance, K at the end of the processor name indicates that it can be clocked and are meant for desktops only. Similarly, U series chips are meant for mobile only and come in 15W and 28W variants.
