Intel Whiskey Lake continues to be officially established, and it is the most recent lineup of 8th-Generation mobile processors behind the next generation of laptops. This next-gen mobile structure was announced back in Computex 2018 along with the Amber Lake Y-series fanless chips.

Now, why there are two distinct microarchitectures for laptops is beyond us, but they're both products of the next refinement of Skylake. The two Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake will take Kaby Lake Refresh's place since the finest processors for laptops and Ultrabooks. However, wait, were not there several Coffee Lake U-series processors declared back in April?

There surely were! However, we have not seen lots of Coffee Lake U-series show up, and that Whiskey Lake was at a slew of laptops at CES 2019, we doubt we ever will. Notably since Ice Lake was announced in January's tech show, to get a late 2019 launch.

So, although Intel is still afflicted by supply problems, Whiskey Lake is behind a number of the finest Ultrabooks out today, such as the newest Dell XPS 13. Thus, with that in mind, we will dive right into what Whiskey Lake has to offer. Keep this page bookmarked, and we are going to keep it updated with all the latest information.

• What is it? Intel’s latest mobile microarchitecture 
• When is it out? Fall 2018  
• What will it cost? Depends on the laptop

Release date

Even though Whiskey Lake was declared back in 2018, it was only when CES 2019 that we actually begun to see them show up in real devices.

There are loads of new devices with Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors, such as the Dell XPS 13, the brand new Asus ZenBooks as well as the light and thin Acer Swift 7 2019.

And, we got to get a sign of what is going to come following Whiskey Lake, as Intel announced its second generation of mobile Ice Lake processors, assembled to a 10nm process. We ought to observe these processors launching in late 2019, but we may need to wait till 2020 to really observe some laptops.

Price

Since Whiskey Lake is a mobile microarchitecture, it is unlikely that the purchase price of the genuine chip will impact most customers. As an example, the Intel Core i5-8250U is recorded at $297 (about £225, AU$400) along with the Intel Core i7 8550U at $409 (about £310, AU$551). Nonetheless, these are not actually public confronting costs, and is rather what laptop makers pay to incorporate these processors in their laptops.

Thus, we're getting 3 15W TDP U-series processors and 3 5W Amber Lake Y-series processors. Using a Core i3 (or m3), i5 and i7 in either category, we could anticipate a fairly broad assortment of laptops starting at approximately $500 (roughly £389, AU$680) for the m3 and i3 laptops, whereas Core i7-backed notebooks are expensive, probably around $1,000 (£760, AU$1,350).

Either way, Whiskey Lake was only started, so we're convinced we will see pricing for the laptops sporting these new processors in the very close to future.

Intel introduced three Whiskey Lake processors, a Core i3, a Core i5 along with also a Core i7. The Core i5 and i7 are equally four-core, 8 thread processors, similar to their Kaby Lake R brethren, whereas the Core i3 still rocks two cores and four threads. Where they set themselves apart is at their clock rates.

The inventory clocks around the Core i5 and i7 are nearly exactly the same as the Core i5-8250U and Core i7-8550U in 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz respectively. However, Intel, has fostered the increase clocks to the Core i5-8265U and Core i7-8565U radically -- around 4.6GHz and 3.9GHz, respectively.

We have not seen this performance increase translates into RE: real world performance, but users probably won't detect a difference. But this much of an increase at Turbo Boost rates can back up Intel's claim that Whiskey Lake could have up to some double increase in performance within 7th-generation Kaby Lake processors.

So far as the integrated GPU goes, however, it looks like Intel is sticking with the Intel UHD Graphics 620 chip found from the Kaby Lake-R processors, and therefore don't expect enormously improved GPU performance with this brand new microarchitecture -- even though Intel says players are going to have the ability to play games with only the integrated graphics.

What is probably more noteworthy than clock rates and GPU improvements, however is the fact that Intel has found a way to incorporate 802.11 AC Wi-Fi to the PCH on Whiskey Lake processors. This operation is not included in the Amber Lake Y-series processors, but Intel is offering different solutions for all those fanless versions -- at the top of eSIM support for laptop manufacturers that are looking to build LTE modems into fresh laptops.

We are sure we will get more info about these new processors perform after we get our hands on laptops running them. Therefore, till then, make sure you check back often, as we will add any info that comes our way.