According to a post on the NotebookReview forums by a member of the Eurocom support team, Intel looks to be preparing an 8-thread, 16-core processor for their mainstream lineup. Eurocom is a European manufacturer of high-end workstations and laptops, and their recent post mentions that their Tornado F5 laptop will skip the Z370 chipset and head right for Z390 in the second half of 2018.
This revelation has us thinking that Intel knows that they must start looking at increased core counts with their “Ice Lake” processors to maintain a competitive edge on AMD’s Ryzen platform, which already offers multiple 8-core, 16-thread CPUs.
This type of news is great, as competition between AMD and Intel typically drives prices down, something we can all agree is good, especially in the limelight of the currently inflated videocard pricing.