Intel Coffee Lake Refresh discontinuation notice issued

Intel has published a Product Change Notification regarding its 9th generation Core processor series. The whole range of Coffee Lake chips are to be discontinued in 2021. This is a range of processors which brought us the Bit-Tech Extreme award winning Intel Core i9-9900K, as well as budget gaming build favourite the i5-9400F. Intel’s Coffee Lake Refresh family of processors is a milestone as the chipmaker widely upgraded the core/thread counts compared to previous generations under pressure from the competition. Coffee Lake Refresh CPUs were built on Intel’s 14nm++ process and started to be released from Q4 2018.

In the official PCN (PDF link) Intel shares a few important dates with regard to the discontinuation and end of life of these 9th gen Core processors. The first thing to note is that Intel kicked off its discontinuation program this Monday, but that isn’t really of any consequence to end users. An important date for consumers is 25th June 2021 as that is flagged as the date when boxed processors will no longer be for sale.

OEMs and so on will still be able to order trays of processors up until 25th June, the resulting systems will be sold in months following, and Intel will continue to fill orders for these up until Christmas 2021. After that you will have scour bargain bins, end of line sales, and the used market for Coffee Lake Refresh.

If the departure of Coffee Lake Refresh pulls at your heart strings then, not to worry, there are newer and better processors being launched all the time. AMD might be selling 5nm Zen 4 processors by the time the 9th gen Core processors meet their final resting place. If you want to stick with Intel and 14nm (+++ etc) it has Rocket Lake coming up in Q1 2021, and will move to 10nm Alder Lake hybrid desktop processors before 2022 arrives, if all goes to plan.