Ahead of their unveiling later this week, four Intel Core i5 and Core i7 U-series (ultra-low power) mobile processor SKUs surfaced in Intel's public price-lists. The prices in the list are meant for notebook manufacturers, for each chip purchased in 1,000-unit tray quantities. The specifications of these SKUs put out in the price-list indicate that Intel is keeping up with its drive to increase core-counts across its product-stack, even with TDP as tight as 15W (that's 15W for quad-core chips). The nominal clock speeds of these chips are kept very low, and their Turbo Boost frequencies are kept high, so there's tighter control over when the processor wants to spend power on performance.

The lineup is led by the Core i7-8650U, which is a 4-core/8-thread SKU with a clock speed of 1.90 GHz, and max Turbo Boost over 4.00 GHz; 8 MB of L3 cache, and a price of USD $409. Selling at the same exact price is the i7-8550U, with a slightly lower clock speed of 1.80 GHz, and 4.00 GHz Turbo Boost. The Core i5 lineup, interestingly, is 4-core/8-thread (includes HyperThreading support), even through its L3 cache amount is 6 MB. The i5-8350U ticks at 1.70 GHz, and an unknown Turbo Boost clock, and is priced at $297; while at the same price, the i5-8520U is clocked at 1.60 GHz, with 3.40 GHz Turbo Boost. The four chips will already be up for order in August 2017, and the first finished-products based on these chips could launch by Holiday.