Intel leaks suggest a 40th-anniversary CPU is coming soon

By Jayce Wagner April 16, 2018

It’s been nearly 40 years since Intel’s first x86 chip, the 8086, hit the market started its slow takeover of the microprocessor industry. If you’ve ever used a computer, you’ve used a processor based on the x86 architecture. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 8086 chip, rumor has it Intel is planning to roll out a special edition processor with a few tricks up its sleeve.

According to several sources, the 40th anniversary processor will be called the i7-8086K, an unlocked six-core processor with a clock speed of 4.0GHz. Wccftech reports that the chip, if its specs are to be believed, will be among the fastest six-core processors on the market.

“The Core i7-8086K has similar core configuration as the Core i7-8700K. It features six cores, 12 threads and 12 MB of L3 cache. The TDP is maintained at 95 watts which is the same as the Core i7-8700K. The clock speeds are currently the fastest for an Intel 6 core processor,” Wccftech reports.

The processor features a base clock of 4.0GHz with turbo boost speeds up to 5.1GHz. Apparently that’s only using a single core, however. The multi-core boost performance tops out at 4.4GHz without any overclocking.

The performance cited comes from Chinese-language sources which claim to have acquired a sample of the i7-8086K processor, so take the news with a grain of salt. That said, it wouldn’t be the first time Intel has rolled out an anniversary edition of one of its flagship processors — and it wouldn’t be the first time said processor was something a little special.

To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Pentium line, Intel released the Pentium G3258 processor which featured surprisingly robust overclock capabilities as an homage to notoriously overlock-friendly Pentium Celeron chips.

So this is all something Intel has done before. The leaks also suggest fortuitous timing for the proposed i7-8086K. Computex lands on June 8, which would be very close to the actual 40th anniversary of the original x86 processor. Whether or not we’ll see this anniversary edition, or if it’s just an elaborate hoax, remains to be seen, but these leaks definitely make a strong case that Intel could have something special planned.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

A staff writer for the Computing section, Jayce covers a little bit of everything -- hardware, gaming, and occasionally VR.

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