WWCFTech has collected a few rumors, based on AIDA64 release notes and HKEPC, about Intel’s CPU launches for the upcoming year. There are some ambiguities, however. First off, WCCFTech believes (although with the level of confidence of a “?” in their table) that these SKUs will be created using some 14nm fabrication process, although the Chinese source calls it Cannonlake, which implies 10nm (unless Intel repurposed the code name).

The big news, if true, would be that Intel is planning on elevating their top-end mainstream processor to eight cores (sixteen threads). This one-ups (or technically two-ups) the boost given to Coffee Lake a couple of months ago, where we finally exceeded four cores on a non-enthusiast SKU from Intel. Even with this bump, however, AMD’s Ryzen was still a worthy competitor in highly-threaded workloads, such as Handbrake, although Intel had a clear win in many games, especially Hitman (2016).

The original rumor, from HKEPC, doesn’t make any speculations about L3 cache size, although WCCFTech seems confident that it will be 16MB. This is a 33% bump over the i7-8700k, inline with the 33% bump in core count (which doesn’t need to go hand-in-hand, but they believe will in this case).

If you’re hearing this just after purchasing an 8700k, don’t worry too much. HKEPC believes that these processors will launch in the second half of 2018, so you probably still have another nine or ten months with Intel’s best mainstream SKU.