Leaked Intel Coffee Lake 6-core CPU benchmarks matches AMD Ryzen 5 1600X; finally, a proper response from Intel?

Well Intel, it took you long enough. After years of dominating the mainstream market with a measly 4 cores and 8 threads, Intel is going to release a hexa-core CPU in the mainstream LGA1151 platform to show AMD who’s boss. Or are they? Someone at MSI decided to run Geekbench without disabling their internet connection, thus leading to this leak. It shows the Intel’s hexa-core CPU slightly edging out the Ryzen 5 1600X in Geekbench’s single-core and multi-core benchmarks.

From these screenshots, we know that the Intel 6-core Coffee Lake CPU will come with 1.5MB of L2 cache (256KB per core) and 12MB of L3 cache. The Ryzen 5 1600X has 3MB of L2 cache (512KB per core) and 16MB of L3 cache. The clock speeds of the benchmarked Coffee Lake CPU is quite low for Intel’s recent standards, which will probably see their higher end retail parts clocked above 4GHz. We also do not know if the CPU in question has boost clocks enabled, which would mean that it was running at above the 3.19 GHz stated in the screenshot.

Coffee Lake is expected to be paired with the 300-series of chipsets, with the 200-series of motherboards not supporting the newer architecture despite sharing the same LGA1151 socket. Intel has also yet to be able to perform a die shrink, still relying on their 14nm process for the Coffee Lake series.

Pokdepinion: Finally Intel is getting off their lazy bums and working to add more cores to their higher end CPUs, rather than just pushing out some claimed IPC gains every year with the same core counts. We definitely need more details such as whether the Intel 6-core CPU will have unlocked multipliers, and of course, how much will it cost. If it costs significantly more than AMD’s offering, then I can see enthusiasts voting with their wallets and getting themselves some Red CPUs.