Apple iMac Pro Announced Starting At Just $4999

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WolfpackN64 said:

True, and hopefully Intel moves all their products up two cores. Still waiting till I can get my hands on a quad core 13-inch Macbook Pro :)

Pentiums and Celerons just like the Core M and Y series mobile chips will certainly stay at 2 cores, at least for now. The only exeption are the Atom based Celerons, which have 4 cores 

I think Intel might move up their desktop naming scheme soon to this: i7 for hexa/octacore with HT, i5 for quadcore with HT and hexa/octacore without HT, i3 for quadcore without HT, Pentium for Dualcore with HT and Celeron for dualcores

A quadcore 13inch Macbook Pro will certainly be possible soon, the question is if Apple has any intention to make those.

SuperNova said:

Yuup. Hopefully Intel gets their shit toghether, they've been resting on their laurels for too long. We should at least get some nice pricedrops from the competition and since Intel already annouced pricedrops for coffee lake I'm pretty optimistic about future drops as long as Zen stays on schedule.

Doubt it, CEO Krzanich fired so much talent an dried up research funds because he thought AMD and IBM (the latter in Servers) could never catch up again, leaving the Processor department in shambles. There's a reason why the IPC didn't move much anymore since Haswell, getting most of their performance gains since then through higher clock speeds. Instead, Krzanich wanted to move big into the Internet of Things products (connected appliances) - but even a core m or an Atom processor is massively oversized and doesn't come with the needed integrated connectivity. They restarted to rehire new personnel and increasing the research funds again, but that will take years to take any real effect.

Trying to keep up with AMDs APUs in the graphics department also made them constantly increase the TDP on the top model i7: 77W on Ivy Bridge, 84/88W on Haswell, and 91W since Skylake. Now Kaby Lake X comes with 112W TDP despite not bringing much more than the base 7700K/7600K models and not coming with an iGP

The reason for the Coffe Lake pricedrops are certainly because they could see that there's no chance in Hell they still could keep up their old price model with Ryzen on the loose. Worse, by the time Coffee Lake finally comes out, AMD will release their 14nm LPP+ Chips with Pinnacle Ridge (otherwise identicl with Summit Ridge, aka Zen/Ryzen), which allowed already higher clock speeds on the RX 5xx GPU line compared to the RX 4xx. So The upgraded Zen will come with 2-400 additional Mhz, basically nullifying the plus Coffee Lake brings over Kaby Lake.

Intel still has some technical advantages though: A somewhat better IPC, higher clock speeds and much better AVX integration. However, AVX is still very niche in real life, the clock speed gap might get pretty thin with Pinnacle Ridge and the IPC advantage might even be lost when Zen 2 launches. Which leaves Intel still with one, gretty giant advantage: sheer Brand recognition, especially in mobile computers, since the laptop producers couldn't assemble an halfway decent APU based Laptop if their life would have been on the line, pretty much every Laptop and notebook is fired by an Intel CPU - and those are the computers non-gamers generally buy.