Intel Coffee Lake leak indicates three six-core LGA1151 parts with a 3.7GHz-4.3GHz top-of-the-range offering

Is Intel beginning to feel the heat from AMD Ryzen?

With AMD's Ryzen 3 launch imminent, some details of Intel's planned new Coffee Lake microprocessors have been leaked.

Intel is planning to offer a trio of six-core, 12-thread devices, with a leaked CPU-Z screenshot of an engineering sample suggesting they will slot into Intel's standard LGA1151 socket. The leak also indicated a part with a 3.5GHz base clock speed, but capable of boosting to 4.3GHz on at least one core, and a 12MB level-3 cache. The rumours come courtesy of Guru3D.

It followed that up with a table of more details on the three Coffee Lake parts, with a low-end part offering a base core frequency of 3.1GHz and a boost-clock (single core) of 4.2GHz, with all six-cores capable of clocking at a "max core turbo frequency" of 3.9GHz. While that will have a maximum TDP of 64-watts, the other two will have 95-watts.

The second of the two hexacore offerings will run at 3.2GHz, boosting to 3.6GHz in a single core and 3.4GHz on all six cores. The high-end part will run at a base clock speed of 3.7GHz, boosting to 4.3GHz on a single core and 4GHz on all six.

All three parts will support DDR4 with a 2400MHz integrated memory controller frequency. Only the cheaper of the three parts will not offer DDR overclocking.

Coffee Lake was supposed to be appearing in 2018 at the 10nm fab node. Instead, though, Intel has put back that challenging manufacturing shift and is producing Coffee Lake on its current 14nm facilities, pushing up wattage to provide a performance boost.

AMD, meanwhile, is gearing up for its imminent Ryzen 3 launch. Details leaked earlier this month indicate that there will be just two parts - the Ryzen 3 1200 and the Ryzen 3 1300X - both of which will be four core and four thread devices, which will be priced at $109 and $129, respectively.

The Ryzen 3 1200 will offer a base clock speed of 3.1GHz and a boost speed of 3.5GHz, while the Ryzen 3 1300X will run at 3.5GHz base, with 3.7GHz boost, according to the leaks. Both parts will have the same 2MB level-2 cache and 8MB level-3 cache of the Ryzen 5 parts. AMD is expected to pitch the Ryzen 3 as a sold, value option for 1080p gaming, among other applications.