Intel Kaby Lake vs. Coffee Lake

[jon08]

So, with the recent release of Firefox Quantum and its use of "multi cores" there has been increased talk that sooner than later more and more developers will start optimizing apps to utilize more cores, and following AMD's Ryzen, Intel has now released Coffee Lake with 6 cores.

On condition that iMacs were to get a Coffee Lake refresh next year, how much difference do you think it would really make as compared to, say, the current Kaby Lake i5-7600k or i7-7700k? Will they be likely to be underclocked in iMac and thus not as effective as they could be?

 

[Huddy]

You'll get different results depending on the review test bed but the Coffee Lake i7-8700k is roughly around 5c hotter at stock than the i7-7700k with the i5-8600k coming in around the same as a stock 7700k. The processors will not be under clocked, whether they can be throttled is another question.

Who knows what Apple will do regarding the cooling design of the 2018 iMac, I feel the current 2017 is underwhelming with cooling the i7 at load which is one of the reasons mine went back.

Like you state with the release of Ryzen and Intel FINALLY moving on from 4 cores at consumer level more software will begin to utilise the available cores but this will take a while yet, there are a very large amount of very good computers out there that will be on 4 cores for many years to come.

I'm hoping we don't have to wait long for the Coffee Lake iMac to appear, early Q2 please Apple.