Intel Core i7-8700K 6-Core Coffee Lake And i5-8400K CPUs Bust-Out In SiSoft Sandra Benchmark Results

Based on leaked results over the past few weeks, it appears Intel is on the right track with its 8th generation Core desktop processor lineup (Coffee Lake). We will not know for sure until we have had an opportunity to put finalized silicon through the ringer, but in the meantime, benchmark results continue to pop up on the web. The latest batch is from a SiSoftware SANDRA run in which Intel's Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400K processors were put to the test.


Staring with the Core i7-8700K, it is a unique chip in that it will be the first mainstream processor from the Santa Clara chip maker to feature 6 physical cores and 12 threads. Up until Coffee Lake, Intel has been content to limit its mainstream lineup to no more than 4 physical cores and 8 threads, but with AMD and its Ryzen desktop lineup upping the ante, Intel may have felt compelled to respond with Coffee Lake.

The Core i7-8700K will also take residence as the flagship part in the Coffee Lake lineup. During an overseas presentation, Intel claimed it would offer an 11 percent gain in single-threaded performance versus the current Core i7-7700K, and a 51 percent jump in multi-threaded performance, the latter of which is partially attributable to having more cores and threads at its disposal.

That said, here is a look at the SiSoftware SANDRA benchmark run:


Here are the numbers we are looking at, along with how they compare to aggregated Core i7-7700K results in SiSoftware's SANDRA database:

• Processor Arithmetic: 217.98 GOPS (versus 149.99 GOPS)—45 percent increase
• Processor Multi-Media: 658.57 Mpix/s (versus 447.76 Mpix/s)—47 percent increase
• Processor Cryptography: 10.47 GB/s (versus 9.34 GB/s)—12 percent increase
• Scientific Analysis (Single Precision): 61.41 GFLOPS (versus 48.51 GFLOPS)—26 percent increase
• Scientific Analysis (Double Precision): 32.11 GFLOPS (versus 24.40 GFLOPS)—32 percent increase

Collectively we are looking at around a 32.4 percent jump in performance. We also see that Intel's claimed performance figures are not too far off. That is encouraging, especially if you have been holding off on upgrading in hopes that Coffee Lake would bring enough of a boost over whatever architecture you are currently running.

Moving onto to the Core i5-8400K, this one has the distinction of being the first-ever Core i5 chip with 6 physical cores. It does not support Hyper Threading, so we are looking at 6 cores/threads of processing.

Here are the SiSoftware SANDRA results:


And here are the numbers we are looking at, along with how they compare with a Core i5-7600K:

• Processor Arithmetic: 145.05 GOPS (103.66 GOPS)—40 percent increase
• Processor Multi-Media: 420.54 Mpix/s (279.69 Mpix/s)—50 percent increase
• Processor Cryptography: 9.78 GB/s (8.45 GB/s)—14 percent increase
• Scientific Analysis (Single Precision): 71.68 GFLOPS (51.38 GFLOPS)—39 percent increase
• Scientific Analysis (Double Precision): 31.35 GFLOPS (26.72 GFLOPS)—17 percent increase

Once again, Coffee Lake is showing around a 32 percent collective improvement, with gains across the board in a variety of tests. Of course, these are synthetic benchmarks, but in our experience SiSoftware SANDRA has been a good indicator of real-world performance as well.

It will be interesting to see how Intel prices its Coffee Lake processors. Hopefully the chip maker comes out aggressive with pricing, especially since Coffee Lake on the desktop will require a new motherboard/chipset even though it uses the same pin count and socket as Kaby Lake.