Intel Announces Limited Edition Core i7-8086K, New 28-Core CPU

As rumored earlier this week, Intel has announced a new, limited edition Coffee Lake CPU: The Core i7-8086K. This new chip will have a 4GHz base clock and 5GHz boost, with six cores, 12 threads, and the same iGPU turbo clock as the rest of the 8th Generation Core i7 family (1.2GHz).

The new core isn’t just a top-end SKU, however it’s a limited edition CPU, with just 50,000 parts planned at this point. Intel isn’t revealing all of the turbo frequencies, but we’ve seen speculation online that the chip will have a 4.6GHz all-core turbo frequency.

If true, this would work out to a 300MHz clock jump across the board compared with the Core i7-8700K’s 3.7GHz base, 4.3GHz all-core turbo, and 4.7GHz single-core boost. (The performance gains at each clock frequency come out to 1.08x, 1.07x, and 1.06x at base, all-core, and max respectively).


Pricing is currently unclear as well. Intel is actually planning to auction 8,086 of these CPUs on a sweepstakes site (you can sign up here starting on Thursday June 7, at 5 PM EDT).

The listed approximate value from the sweepstakes page is $425, but with so few of these CPUs being produced at all, it’s not clear if we’ll ever see the chips for sale on any channel site. They may be reserved for OEMs and boutique system builders instead of being made more generally available.

Intel’s 28-Corestrocity

Intel’s other major Computex 2018 demo was a 5GHz 28-core unannounced CPU shown tearing through Cinebench in what PCWorld describes as “a few seconds.”

With its supposed 5GHz clock speed, it certainly would but Intel isn’t announcing anything about the chip, including its model number, beyond saying it’s a single-socket system with a 28-core CPU.