Intel’s Entire 2018, 2019 CPU Roadmap May Have Just Leaked

For the last few months, there have been rumors about Intel’s upcoming 9th Generation family and its upcoming changes to Intel’s product line. We’ve known for a few months that Intel was prepping a new high-end desktop chipset, the X390, and recent leaks have pointed to a new Core i9, as well as changes to the Core i7 family.

Now, a Chinese site is claiming to have leaked Intel’s entire CPU roadmap for the next year, and it has a few surprises. First, take this with very much the usual grain of salt. Roadmaps are easy to fake and people periodically do so. But with that said, let’s look at what we’ve got. HK.XFastest posted multiple slides, but not all of them are relevant to the 2018 / 2019 roadmap question. We’ve excerpted the relevant images into the slideshow below. Each slide can be clicked on to open a larger version in a new window.

If this slide is accurate, Intel's Core i7-8700K will stay top dog through the back half of this year, with the 9th Generation Core i7 dropping in Q1 2019. That would align it as a two-year follow-up on Kaby Lake and a substantial two-year upgrade over that family of parts.

No major changes on the chipset front. The Z390 slips into and over top the Z370, with support for features like USB 3.1 Gen 2, but the X299 chipset will remain at the top of Intel's stack.

This slide implies that Intel is planning a near-term response to AMD's 32-core Threadripper, but it's not clear if that plan will require new motherboards. It would be unusual for Intel to launch an HEDT refresh without a new motherboard standard, but not entirely unheard of — Ivy Bridge-E was a drop-in replacement on Sandy Bridge-E if you owned a motherboard made by someone other than Intel.

A matrix of CPU support by motherboard family. No big surprises here, but it confirms that the Core i9-9900K is an enthusiast product, not an HEDT chip. Assuming, of course, that the leaked roadmap is accurate.

Overall, these leaks make fairly good sense. They imply that Intel’s Core i9 refresh and Core i7 repositioning won’t be driven by a top-to-bottom product family overhaul — but the chances that Intel would revamp its entire Core i3 and i5 lineup so soon after upgrading those chips just last year was never particularly high. What’s unclear, however, is what will happen to Intel’s desktop line next year. Originally, Intel planned to introduce a 10nm node for mobile-only, while desktop chips would continue on 14nm++. This plan, however, was functionally predicated on 10nm showing up on time. With 10nm now badly delayed, it’s not clear what happens to Intel’s desktop roadmap. The delay to the 9th Generation launch (if true) is a bit surprising, but launching at CES would give Intel a strong marketing push for its newest chips.

If Kaby Lake was built on 14nm+ and Coffee Lake on 14nm++, the 9th Generation family would be built on 14nm+++, assuming Intel even has a defined process node extension in the first place. Any chips that launch next year would be built on 14nm++++, which is the point at which I start asking if we should be using superscripts or exponential notation. 14⁴ makes much better sense than an endless stream of pluses.

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