Intel unveils its 'most powerful' Core i9 CPUs for laptops

Coffee Lake Core i9 CPUs sporting six cores and 4.8GHz 'boost' clock speed intended for high-end laptops

Intel has unveiled a series of new high-end Core i9 CPUs running its eight-generation Coffee Lake microarchitecture aimed at laptops.

Reflecting the competition posed by AMD's Ryzen CPUs, Intel has upped both core count and clock speeds.

The Intel Core i9-8950HK offers six cores and 12 threads and can hit clock speeds of up to 4.8GHz when boosted, promising some serious performance in a chip suitable for laptops.

Intel is promising a 29 per cent hike in overall boosted speeds compared to its previous seventh-generation, Kaby Lake CPUs, which had been criticised for lacklustre performance.

The performance boost translates into a 59 per cent hike in 4K video editing performance, Intel claims, and a 41 per cent improvement in gaming performance.

And those are the two areas Intel is targeting the chips at, so you can expect to see the Core i9-8950HK pop up in gaming laptops and mobile workstations aimed at high-end video editing, though we'll have to wait and see if it can live up to the claim of being "the best gaming and creation laptop processor Intel has ever built".

Alongside the new Core i9 chip, Intel also revealed eighth-gen Core i5 and Core i7 chips for laptops, which again make use of the enhanced 14nm fabrication process that underpins the Coffee Lake architecture. These also promise high-end gaming and video editing performance, as well as enough grunt to power virtual reality headsets and Microsoft's 'Mixed Reality' goggles.

These chips and their desktop counterparts are also getting support for Intel's Optane memory, which is designed to help make computers with traditional spinning disk hard drives run more like SSDs by having a new memory tier that can essentially memorise commonly loaded files and data, making them faster to load on a machine with just a traditional HDD.

The new family chips will have a '+' in their badges to highlight that they are Coffee Lake generation slices of silicon and are Optane ready, which is handy as Intel's chip range can be rather confusing at times, especially as it has another family of processors that mix Core i-series CPUs with AMD's Vega GPUs on a single chip.