A user from [H]ardOCP has posted on the website's forums an exchange he had with the customer service over at Newegg. If availability of Intel's latest 8th Gen CPUs was rumored to be limited before, this seems to bring some more credence to those reports. Case in point: over at Newegg, orders for the Core i5 8600K processor are currently being put on back-order, with estimated shipping dates of 15 to 20 days. Pore over the i7 8700K processor, though, and you'll find it currently out of stock.

Newegg has apparently ordered over 3000 units of the Core i7 8700K CPU alone, in order to keep pace with demand (these have been well-received chips as you can see on TPU's own reviews). Newegg expects these to come in at around a "3 to 5 weeks" time-frame. What separates this particular availability problem from being simply an issue of overly high demand is that Intel's Coffee Lake processors were already expected to be limited in availability even before they were launched. Remember that while Intel probably had such six-core processors as these taped out well in advance already, they did pull up their launch window so as to better compete with current AMD Ryzen offerings.

In what could be a decisive response from Intel towards AMD's recent Ryzen success and core count democratization, reports are making the rounds that Intel is preparing for a shakedown of sorts of its i7 and i5 CPU line-up under the upcoming Coffee Lake architecture. We recently saw (and continue to see) AMD deliver much more interesting propositions than Intel in a pure power/performance/core ratio. And Intel seems to know that its lineup is in dire need of revision, if it wants to stop its market dominant position from bleeding too much.

A report from Canard PC claims that Intel will thoroughly revise its CPU lineup for the Coffee Lake architecture, with an i7-8700K six-core, 12-thread processor being the top offering. This 8700K is reported to deliver its 12 threads at a 3.7 GHz base clock, and a 95 W TDP. These are comparable to AMD's Ryzen 5 1600X processor, which ships with the same six cores and 12 threads under the same TDP, though it has 100 MHz less in base clock speed. However, AMD's Ryzen 5 1600X does retail for about $249 - and you can go even lower to Ryzen 5 1600's $219 - which probably won't happen with Intel's top of the line i7 offering. A slight mention towards the Ryzen 7's 95 W TDP - the same as this reported i7 8700K - even though it has 2 more physical cores, and 4 extra threads.