Intel's newest 8th generation Core processors are here and have delivered promising early results in our initial tests on the desktop, and more recently in Dell's XPS 13 laptop as well. The biggest change with Intel's 8th Gen Core Mobile processors comes by way of doubled core counts. This makes many of this new generation of Core i5 and i7 mobile chips true quad-core processors now, with support for up to eight threads with Hyper Threading, all within a 15W TDP target. This improvement does not come without trade-offs, of course, as we see base clocks dropped by up 900MHz relative to each chip's predecessor.

However, Intel has also seen fit to keep boost clocks high and even increased a bit across the board, so bursty single-threaded tasks ought to be as snappy as ever and multithreaded workloads should fly -- thermals permitting.