It's poor, because like most of Intels Products, when they are running behind (in this case AMD) they rush out paper launches. Throughout Intels history, this is common practice. Anyone remember the 1Ghz Pentium? Anyway, my thoughts, poor yields at the factory and extremely limited production, just to say, we have this.. look... we are honest people!

Doubt the quality will be the same. There is a reason why none of the german car makers are importing the cars (made in china) to germany, even that labor is a large portion of the cost (to make a car).

Even Trump couldn't stop the giant Intel from moving production to China. I have no idea what might be the human factor in manufacturing CPUs. If there are only a few humans needed to assure the quality, then there's no real reason why the quality would be different. If they pay a big enough salary, they can get the well-educated, talented Chinese engineers who are no worse than anywhere else in the world. But if it takes a lot of people and Intel is only planning to save money by paying low wages (it's a financial corporation, not a technology corporation, after all), it could be an entirely different story.

If this brought down prices of their unlocked processors then I'm all for it, but I don't see that happening. For the i3, it's a $60 premium to have an unlocked processor. For the i5, it's a $100 premium to have an unlocked processor. That's just beyond greedy. I'm not trying to turn this into an AMD vs Intel discussion, but you can get an unlocked Ryzen and have the advantage of having an unlocked processor. Don't know if it's the case but I heard if you have a locked Coffee Lake cpu you can't set a higher memory frequency even an XMP profile for your memory?

vbetts:

If this brought down prices of their unlocked processors then I'm all for it, but I don't see that happening. For the i3, it's a $60 premium to have an unlocked processor. For the i5, it's a $100 premium to have an unlocked processor. That's just beyond greedy. I'm not trying to turn this into an AMD vs Intel discussion, but you can get an unlocked Ryzen and have the advantage of having an unlocked processor. Don't know if it's the case but I heard if you have a locked Coffee Lake cpu you can't set a higher memory frequency even an XMP profile for your memory?

this may seem a bit unwieldy as an analogy, but i think it's apt - Intel is taking an Airbus A380 strategy (clock speeds thus equivalent to passenger load - one giant hammer) while AMD is taking the Boeing Dreamliner strategy ( able to use regional airports, modular construction - lots of smaller hammers)... right now Boeing has won the argument, it remains to be seen about AMD.

Kaarme:

Even Trump couldn't stop the giant Intel from moving production to China. I have no idea what might be the human factor in manufacturing CPUs. If there are only a few humans needed to assure the quality, then there's no real reason why the quality would be different. If they pay a big enough salary, they can get the well-educated, talented Chinese engineers who are no worse than anywhere else in the world. But if it takes a lot of people and Intel is only planning to save money by paying low wages (it's a financial corporation, not a technology corporation, after all), it could be an entirely different story.

Its not that simple, you dont build FABs overnight, it takes years

yearS? doubt that. maybe one, and even if, china can throw ten times more ppl at it which will speed up the whole process a lot.

finally out of pre-production I see, hopefully these new chips will oc even better than the earlier samples

My local Microcenter must be one of the luckiest retailers because almost every time ive checked, they've had these chips in stock. Right now they have the 8700, 8600k, and 8700k in stock.

I think its a political move because of 7xxx series inventory more than anything. You can still buy those CPU everywhere. Also, who the heck would certify a new fab with a top end CPU product? That China fab must have be already producing something before Intel would let them have a go at the K series CPU. The last thing I would worry about would be ASIC quality. If these fabbed cpus will OC the same, then thats a great sign of things to come. A lot of the web testing so far have been Engineering samples hitting high OC where as most production CPU never get that high. I remember Haswell going up nearly to 5 GHZ but when production came out for the first few batchs, most were down at 4.4 to 4.5 GHZ. Its only at the end of the cycle that more, not most, were hitting over 4.7 + GHZ delidded. So I would love to see a boxed retail unit tested to see how far those cpu will really go before buying.