I was browsing around looking at different laptops and comparing their CPUs and… I noticed something weird about the CPU mentioned above, the Core i3-8130U.
When I was putting that model in comparison tools like on cpu.userbenchmark.com, I noticed that it said that this is not a Coffee Lake CPU, instead it was named as Kaby Lake. And when I went to ark.intel.com, it said the same… This is the only 8th Generation Core i3 that’s not a Coffee Lake CPU! What the hell???
Does anyone know why Intel did this? Did they need to do this? Did they do something like this in the past? I’m just curious. And I’m relatively new to computer hardware, so any stories of companies doing weird things like this in the past are welcome!
As always, thanks in advance!
EDIT: I also found a few mobile CPUs like i5-8250U and i7-8550U that are in Kaby Lake R family of processors and also listed as 8th Generation. That is confusing, but a bit less than that Core i3 one.
As you’ve already found out, the 8th Gen U-series chips are all Kaby Lake Refresh, excluding the SKUs with Iris Plus graphics (named as iX-8X9U), which are actually Coffee Lake, but were released later.
Without digging too deep into speculation, the release of the Kaby Lake-R chips was a bit of a kneejerk reaction to AMD getting ready to release their own quad core ULV late last year. Kaby Lake’s production yield was significantly higher than Coffee Lake at the time, so it was easier for Intel to quickly ship parts running on the older architecture, rather than wait to release their ULV quad core chips, and potentially lose market to AMD.
Edit: To add to the confusing naming scheme, Intel quietly released the i3-8121U in May, which is actually Cannon Lake.
They did it to confuse the heck out of consumers to further segment the market. It sucks, but everybody indulges in these shorts of shenanigans these days.
Intel was doing fine with their naming scheme but due to a combination of sudden very good competition from AMD and a realization that yields on their newer processes have been suffering (to put it lightly), it would seem that they completely dropped the ball and just can’t seem to pick it up again. What is the 8th generation? Is it Kaby lake? Coffee lake? Cannonlake? Apparently it’s all three, depending on who you ask.
AMD GPUs are in a similar situation. Depending on the model the 500-series cards have GCN 1.0, GCN 3.0, or GCN 4.0, which were also all used in previous GPU series.
It doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s part of the same generation.
Skylake, kaby lake and coffee lake are all running on the skylake uarch.
The differences in kaby lake are a minor change in the media engine and a refined 14nm process over skylake.
Coffee lake then changed the spec of the 14nm process with an increased gate pitch for higher clocks.
Sorry, I should have mentioned the OEM GPUs are based on different architectures. RX 540 and above are GCN 4, Radeon 530 is GCN 3, Radeon 520 is GCN 1.
For Radeon 400-series the RX460 and above are GCN 4, RX 455 was GCN 2, R7 450 and below were all GCN 1.
GCN 1 started with the HD 7000 series cards back in Q1 2012, GCN 2 was peppered through 2013, GCN 3 mainly in 2015, and GCN 4 in Summer 2016.
As for rebrands, the RX 580 is basically a factory overclocked RX 480, same with the RX 570 and RX 470, and also the same with the RX 560 (14CU) and RX 460.
Ah, ok. Yeah that is kinda dumb. The only one I have a real problem with in that list is the RX455 because RX400 and RX500 series should all be polaris based I think. But yeah, that rebranding thing has to stop for sure.
True they all offer the same IPC, but the big deal with Coffee Lake was increasing core count, even on mobile. So it’s confusing as hell to release one with only 2 cores.
Yes, and all that crap contributes to the confusion. You need to look up a CPU on Ark to have any clue about its capabilities. It sucks, and it’s anti-consumer, and they should stop doing it.
Well realistically all of the Intel CPU’s after the 5th gen have been 6th gen no matter what Intel called them. The “generations” have been fairly minor steps that a few years ago wouldn’t have qualified as a stepping much less a generational shift. So if they want to call they Skylake, Kabylake or Cannonlake they are all Sky-a-like
It work well for them, confuse the people until they take what ever at their price. Intel flog off low end parts and make more money. They are bastards for this and very good at it.
