Intel Coffee Lake-S Rumored For Q1 2018 Release

Intel Coffee Lake-S Shows Up On Intel Roadmap

Consumers who are wondering about Intel’s future processor releases will be happy to know that Intel has provided a roadmap during their presentation at the GALAX GOC 2017 Gaming conference in China. As a presenter at the gaming event, which is held by GPU manufacturer Galaxy and features PC gaming tournaments, product showcases and more, Intel did a demonstration explaining the current CPU market and trends surrounding it, along with Intel’s plans for the future. Intel Coffee Lake-S was featured in a roadmap, along with a few other rumored Intel processors.

According to the original posting that leaked the roadmap from the GOC, which was provided by Chinese-language site mydrivers, Intel Coffee Lake-S will arrive in Q1 2018, along with accompanying 300-Series chipsets, which have been rumored to be the Z390. It is still unclear whether Coffee Lake-S will be compatible with existing Z370 boards, but given Intel’s past history in regards to this and the seemingly reactionary launch of Coffee Lake, I think it is likely that the Z370 chipset will be dead in its tracks and not offer support for the soon-to-be-released processors. With Intel’s roadmap projecting Coffee Lake-S and accompanying boards to be manufactured and announced within the first couple of months of 2018, with a March or April worldwide availability, it may be a good idea to hold off on any potential upgrades you were considering. The Coffee Lake-S release should help lower the price of existing Z370 and Coffee Lake stock in the channel, while also providing performance benefits over existing processors.

Users of Intel’s X299 platform shouldn’t expect any major changes or new processors for at least a year, as Cascade Lake isn’t on the roadmap until the end of 2018. It looks like Intel will continue to use the X299 platform with LGA2066 socket for Cascade Lake, so existing X299 boards will likely work with BIOS updates.

Also on the Intel roadmap, we can see that the low-power Gemini Lake SOC is rumored to see a launch at the very end of 2017.

Perhaps the most exciting rumored Intel processor, Cannon Lake, is not present on this roadmap, though Intel has put out previous slides saying they expect 10nm CPU production to take place by 2018. When the 10nm Cannon Lake is announced, we expect to cause quite a shakeup in the Intel CPU lineup and are interested in how CannonLake will be positioned.