Intel's Most Powerful Laptop Chip, the Mobile 8th Gen Core i9, Is Already Here
Intel has just announced the first ever Core i9 chips for laptops in Beijing, and these new processors are the fastest and most powerful mobile chips have ever introduced. It was also be the first time that the company has come out with a six-core mobile chip, and these will also be the first laptop chips to support the new Optane memory technology.
Altogether, it's a series of firsts for Intel as it recently launched "the best gaming and creation laptop processor" the company has ever built as of this time. The announcement came on Tuesday, April 3, as Intel unveiled its newest line of mobile processors based on the 8th-Gen Coffee Lake design platform.
These new Core i9 chips for mobile is Intel's answer to growing demand for laptops and mobile devices that offer performance on par with a bulkier desktop system, whether it's for high-end gaming with streaming, or for content creation.
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At the very top of Intel's new mobile processor offers is the Intel Core i9-8950HK, a laptop chip that rivals those of top-spec gaming PCs. Intel claims that their new chip can reach speeds of up to 4.8 GHz on turbo boost, with plenty of multitasking power coming with that speed as well.
The series is the first mobile chip from Intel to have up to six cores and 12 threads, which amount to what the chipmaker claims to be a huge 29 percent speed advantage over the 7th-Gen Core chips. According to Intel's benchmarks, this speed boost translates to 41 percent faster performance in gaming and a 59 percent boost in editing 4K video, according to The Verge.
Under ideal conditions, the new chip could even get boosted to speeds of up to 5 GHz, using a new "thermal velocity boost" that laptop makers can take advantage of, along with the fact that the new processors come unlocked for overclocking by default.
"It's the fastest gaming processor we've ever launched," Fredrik Hamberger, general manager for Intel's mobile gaming, confirmed to PC World.
"It really is the closest to desktop performance you can get in a notebook," he added, and it's an important goal for Intel to work towards, as it turns out. With PC gaming on the rise, sales of Intel Core chips that went into gaming notebooks grew 45 percent compared to last year, as Hamberger pointed out.
The new Core i9 series for mobile also brings Intel Optane memory support to laptops, which is a good way for laptop makers to offer the huge storage capacities that normal disc-based hard drives have over Solid State Drives. An Optane memory module, which typically comes with 32 GB of cache memory, can easily boost a 4 TB traditional hard drive to speeds mid-range SSDs are capable of, as PC World examined in depth.
