How far off could Intel's gen8 be for gaming laptops?

I know it's impossible to predict, but buy a new gaming laptop now or wait for gen8? How far off could it possibly be?

 

several months likely

 

Clevo's Coffee Lake LGA models have been out for months already.

 

That depeands on intel. Intel, even after introducing 6cores to bga, still has too low tdp(50w). 6cores barely hit 3.0ghz(which is very low for gaming performance) at that power draw. However the tdp are rumored, anythin can change during release! Just wait till thses models are out and lets see theri performance before buying(if they dont perform too well, then still due to release of coffeelake, kaby lake laptops would get a huge price drop)


Dont forget to mention nvidia's volta, which makes wait worth it!

 

I was under the impression we won't see high performance Volta in a laptop for quite a while?

 

How much time did nvidia take to introduce the pascal mobile? Barely 2 months, expect just a little bit more than that!

 

Desktop Volta mainstream is still not out. Nvidia said that they're aiming for a Q4 release.

 

So Volta is off the table for me then. It's the gen8 CPU that needs consideration then. Hmm...

 

Idk intel is going to release 8th gen gaming laptop cpu until q3!
What i said is, if you're going to wait for 8thgen this much, why not wait a little more and get a newer gen nvidia gpu?! Everytime nvidia releases a new gen gpu, they are like 40-50% faster(which a LOT faster)! Imagine a gtx 980 has almost same performance as of a gtx 1060! Do i need to say more!?
Anyways its your money, your call!
Do what your heart says!

 

I think it'll be a while before Intel 8 core mobile chips are released, they haven't yet done coffee lake 6 cores... And theres also still the general questions hanging over their 10nm process. It has to be much better than 14nm to squeeze even 2ghz out of 8 cores at 45W

If AMD get some cut through with 6/8 cores getting into laptops there may be some progress.

Why there's such a long delay between coffee lake desktop and mobile I can only impute is down to motivation; Intel have no competition in high end mobile, only that single niche Asus (which is paired with a midrange gaming GPU) so there's little motivation.

 

Plus dont forget intel is busy dealing with the spectre/meltdown fiasco right now. Im sure thats got them more than occupied at the moment.

 

Guess maybe I'll go with the current Alienware. Seem to be a good choice.

 

I wouldn't call the GL702ZC a niche per say.
It may be a tad odd given that it has 8cores/16th and RX 580... but it's still advertised as a gaming machine which can also be easily used for content creation and other heavy workloads.
And the laptop games well... on par if not better than GTX 1060 6GB mobile anyway (depending on the game, but mostly on par).

The lack of high end GPU's is mainly to blame on OEM's and possibly AMD.
Vega 56 could easily fit into a mobile undervolting (which would reduce power consumption to lower than Pascal levels without touching the clocks at all). Drop the clocks by a bit too, and you end up with a really low power high end GPU - oddly enough, OEM's and AMD don't seem to be touching the voltages at all.

Mind you, the same GL702ZC now comes with 6c/12th Ryzen 5 (1600) and RX 580 (only difference is the CPU and smaller amount of RAM).
I still think Asus should have executed various aspects of the machine better, but there you go.

The upcoming Raven Ridge APU's will mainly be 4c/8th with Vega igp's...
For anything operating on higher frequencies and with more CPU cores, I guess we will need to wait for 7nm (this process should make 6c/12th and 8c/16th APU's more mainstream I hope).
Not sure if 12nm LP will bring an increase in core count (probably not as it's just a refresh mostly and only a stepping stone to give existing Ryzen lineup a leg-up).