An Intel engineer has been caught boasting on this Linkedin profile that he had a hand in Cannonlake system-on-chip (SoC) parts which integrated four, six, or eight processing cores with a Converged Coherent Fabric (CCF). He described this as acting like the Northbridge of an old-fashioned chipset setup.

Intel has not used this phrase before but it does explain some rather strange job adverts wanting a 'Coherent Fabric Architecture Engineer.' We have not met anyone in the fashion industry who was coherent let alone a fabric maker.

Chipzilla has been making products with lots of processing cores but it seems addicted to four cores on consumer desktops (with or without the HyperThreading technology that extends it to running eight simultaneous threads.)

If the leak is right, then the 10nm Cannonlake family could be offered in hexa- and octa-core varieties.

Boosting the number of CPU cores on its next-generation products would allow the company to continue to tell software developers to concentrate on making the best use of CPU cores rather than looking to HSA and other than the general-purpose GPU  to boost performance.