Intel's 'Coffee Lake' Processors Teased; Might Arrive On Apple's MacBooks In 2018

Chip maker Intel announced yesterday its Core X line of high-end processors including its new Core i9 chips. However, the company also teased its upcoming 8th-generation “Coffee Lake” processors which will be powering Apple’s MacBooks in next year.

Intel’s Coffee Lake processors will be able to deliver 30 percent more performance than the 7th-generation Kaby Lake chips. “We will have more to say about the 8th Gen Intel Core processor in the future but it’s exciting to share that in the latest testing, we’re seeing a performance improvement of more than 30 percent over the 7th Gen Intel Core processor,” Intel senior executive Gregory Bryant said.

Intel’s most recent testing results appear to be more than what the company initially claimed back in February. At the time, Intel said that the 8th-generation chip would only see a 15 percent improvement.

Intel used the benchmark tool SYSmark 2014 version 1.5 to test one processor from each generation, accoridng to Apple Insider. For Kaby Lake, Intel used the 17-7500U with 8GB of DDR4-2133 RAM, while Coffee Lake used an undisclosed “estimates” for a processor with DDR4-2400 memory. The turbo clock speed of the Coffee Lake processor is up to 4GHz, but it’s base clock speed was not given.

Although the tests shows that the Coffee Lake processor is indeed a huge improvement from its Kaby Lake counterpart, Intel says that estimates are “Pre-Silicon and are subject to change, with a 7 percent margin of error. Even with that in mind, Intel’s Coffee Lake processors will surely deliver on improved performance.

Intel says that it plans to make its Coffee Lake lineup available to computer makers sometime during the second half of 2017. This should mean that the first wave computer rocking the next-generation chips will arrive sometime during the holiday season.

The Coffee Lake chips should also be able to provide faster performance and longer battery life for MacBooks. Apple’s current Mac lineup isn’t even using the Kaby Lake yet chips yet, so it’s very likely that MacBooks with Coffee Lake chips will arrive next year.

With Intel already teasing its Coffee Lake processors, the new chip seems like a promising feature that will come included on next year’s MacBook Pro lineup. However, the new chip has some caveats.

It’s very unlikely that Apple’s future MacBook Pro will feature 32GB of RAM. Coffee Lake doesn’t support LPDDR4 RAM which makes it possible it possible to have that much memory. When Apple starts using Intel’s Coffee Lake chips for its MacBook Pro lineup, users will only be able to get a maximum of 16GB of RAM.

IBT reported yesterday that Apple is planning to announce new versions of its 12-inch MacBook and MacBook Pro. There’s also rumors floating around that the MacBook Air, which hasn’t been updated for years now, might also see an upgrade as well.

Apple’s upgraded MacBook Pro is said to finally feature Intel’s Kaby Lake processors. As for the rest of the lineup, those will also receive some upgrades as well, but the Kaby Lake processors have not bee confirmed to be included.

Apple is also reportedly woking on making its own chips which will be used for its future MacBook Pros. It remains to be seen if Apple will announce its plans during WWDC 2017.