As the formal launch of Intel’s new codenamed Whiskey Lake-U processors approaches, it is seemingly inevitable that their model numbers and specifications will get published by OEMs ahead of time. This week HP has done just that, inadvertently publishing the frequencies of some of the upcoming processors, all the while ASUS and Synnex have confirmed their model numbers as well as some other specs. As it appears, Intel has managed to increase Turbo clocks of the new chips rather significantly when compared to their predecessors.

Intel first announced its Whiskey Lake-U processors for mobile PCs back in April and then shed some light on these chips at Computex. According to Intel, the CPUs will belong to its 8th Generation Core family, will be made using a 14 nm process technology, and will offer a double-digit performance gains when compared to the Kaby Lake Refresh parts. It is unclear whether the Whiskey Lake-U processors have any microarchitectural improvements over their ancestors, but this week we learned that they will at least have higher Turbo frequencies.

HP on Wednesday accidentally published specs of its upcoming Pavilion x360 convertible based on the Whiskey Lake-U SoC and disclosed specs of the chips it plans to use. In the meantime, ASUS and Synnex (1, 2) confirmed existence of CPUs with such model numbers.

As it turns out, HP will offer three Whiskey Lake-U processors with its Pavilion x360 notebooks: the quad-core Core i7-8565U, the quad-core Core i5-8265U, as well as the dual-core Core i3-8145U. HP’s disclosure indicates that all of these SoCs feature Intel’s UHD 620 iGPU with 24 EUs, so at least on the graphics front Whiskey Lake-U will offer similar features as their predecessors. In the meantime, specs published by ASUS indicate that the new CPUs will support DDR4-2667 memory, thus offering an upgrade.

If we compare alleged specs of the upcoming Whiskey Lake-U processors with comparable Kaby Lake Refresh chips, we will notice that the new SoCs do not have any advantages in terms of base frequencies, but feature massively higher turbo clocks, on the order of 500 to 700 MHz. The latter will have an impact on responsiveness of future laptops, but under prolonged heavy loads such PCs may not perform much differently than systems featuring KBL-R CPUs.

General Specifications of Intel's 2017/2018 Mainstream Notebook CPUs
Whiskey Lake-U Kaby Lake Refresh
  Cores Freq.
Base
Freq.
Turbo
L3 TDP   Cores Freq.
Base
Freq.
Turbo
L3 TDP
Core i7-8565U 4 1.8 GHz 4.6 GHz 8 MB 15 W Core i7-8550U 4 1.8 GHz 4
GHz
8 MB 15 W
Core i5-8265U 1.6 GHz 4.1 GHz 6 MB Core i5-8250U 1.6 GHz 3.4 GHz 6 MB
Core i3-8145U 2 2.1 GHz 3.9 GHz 4 MB Core i3-8130U 2 2.2 GHz 3.4 GHz 4 MB

Intel traditionally does not comment on unreleased products and therefore it is impossible to verify accuracy of the specs published by HP.

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Sources: Tom’s Hardware, Notebookcheck.net

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  • Valantar - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link

    Considering the current chips easily pull 40-60W while turboing given sufficient cooling and power delivery, you have to wonder how high these will go, and just how short that turbo window is.

    Unchanged base clocks are also pretty telling. Still, faster response times are always good.
  • SquarePeg - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link

    These are my thoughts also. A massive turbo isn't that useful if it has to throttle back down after only 40ms. I'd rather see sustained base clocks come up instead of battery life killing turbo frequencies being raised. But hey, just so long as that press release has higher numbers to show...
  • Valantar - Friday, August 10, 2018 - link

    Yep, a lot of what Intel is doing recently has a certain undertone of "See, we're progressing! Really! Look, it's faster than before!" Of course, whether turboing higher means more power draw depends if they manage to balance boost time and power draw - race-to-sleep is a good tactic for smartphones, but they don't scale to 4-5x their TDP. There's no denying that KBL-R is a great CPU series, but it also leaves the question of where Intel can go from there without 10nm. For now, it looks like the answer is "nowhere, really".
  • LMonty - Saturday, August 11, 2018 - link

    I wonder the same thing. If the all-core sustained boost clocks are increased proportionately, and not just the short-term boost, then Whiskey Lake U will be a very good improvement over Kaby Lake R.

    I have an i5-8250u laptop and it can boost to 2.3 Ghz all cores, indefinitely. 2.5 Ghz when undervolted. But it can boost to 3.4 Ghz all cores for only 7-8 seconds.
  • 29a - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link

    I would like to see an article comparing all of the different * Lake CPUs set at the same clock speed to see how much if any the CPUs have improved in IPC since Sky Lake was released.
  • ikjadoon - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link

    0% IPC improvements since August 2015: https://us.hardware.info/reviews/7602/22/intel-cor...

    I don't trust any testing methodology to stand by <1% differences beyond a margin of error, anyways.

    From Intel's roadmap this week, it will be 2015 to 2020 with only core # / clock frequency powering CPU performance improvements. As 2019 Cannon Lake is only a 10nm die shrink of 2015 Skylake, we'll need to wait until 2020 for even a 1% boost in Intel IPC.
  • Brunnis - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link

    Cannon Lake is not a pure die shrink. Just as with Ivy Bridge and Broadwell, at least some minor (<5%) IPC improvement is likely. I think Anandtech is working on an article regarding this.
  • ikjadoon - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link

    Ah, good point: I forgot we were so lucky that even ticks had some minor IPC improvements (where "minor" would be remarkable these days). Haswell (2013) to Broadwell (2015) was a ~3.3% IPC improvement: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9482/intel-broadwel...

    I'll be quite interested in that article; anything is better than zero. :(
  • ishould - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link

    According to this page: https://cpugrade.com/articles/cinebench-r15-ipc-co... there have been slight IPC increases. It's pretty difficult to extract more IPC without significantly rethinking the entire architecture from scratch and probably breaking most native backwards compatibility
  • Brunnis - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link

    Actually, that page shows that there haven't been any IPC increases. Skylake (6700K) -> Kaby Lake (7700K) -> Coffee Lake (8700K) are performing identically.

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