Since today we deliver the 8th generation Core processors for desktops, the Coffee Lake. Intel introduces six models, all internally based on the Coffee Lake-S chip. At the moment only the i3-8100, i3-8350K, i5-8400 and the i7-8700K are available.
Coffee Lake-S can, in principle, best be described as a Kaby Lake chip, only with six instead of four cores, produced by a further refined 14nm process. Nothing else has changed in the architecture of the CPU cores or the integrated GPU. The switch of quad-core to the 6-core for the i5 and i7 and from 4 cores for i3 is indeed a big change, but from a technical point of view, this generation does not change much.
Furthermore, Coffee Lake contains exactly the same integrated GPU as Kaby Lake, which has been renamed by Intel from HD Graphics 630 to UHD Graphics 630 due to the rise of Ultra HD screens. Be clear, apart from a slightly increased maximum clock frequency with the Core i7’s this integrated GPU is identical. There is support for DirectX 12 and in terms of video Intel offers support for H.264 and (8- and 10-bit) H.265 decoding and encoding (via QuickSync). The VP9 video codec is also supported, although 10-bit VP9 can only be decoded. Thanks to the support for DisplayPort 1.2 it is no problem to connect 4K / Ultra HD monitors, but native support for HDMI 2.0 is still missing (although it can be added with a converter chip). Also adaptive sync (better known as Freesync) shines through absence.