atleast AMD is doing what intel isnt, giving us old architecture but more cores for the EE, in reality a 7980XE is a 6980XE and etc.. i hate intel for that crap.
Threadripper is the same micro arch as the Ryzen counterparts...
Well there's kaby lake X with same kaby lake s series numbering. Both are sky lake arch anyways(as is coffee lake, with little more tweaks). Bigger difference is of course ring bus vs mesh on skylake X, so it's not entirely carbon copy on skylake S micro architecture either. Next HEDT platform processor will be Caskade Lake X, so counting HEDT series numbering they should be i9/i7 8XXX x/xe series.
Haven't seen anything that would indicate that. Intel builds their chips differently than AMD , the 8700 is six core and that's it. If they really did have an 8 core they would have likely made the chip like that from the very beginning and then just disable cores. It's not cost effective , even for someone like Intel , to introduce an entirely new chip like this for what is a relatively niche market.
Intel were literally leaking that information by them selves: Coffee Lake 8+2 ruomors. Obviously it has to be new chip, there ain't disabled cores on current Coffee lake chips.