Intel announced its latest eighth-generation Core processors today, and is promising that the new chips will offer up to a 40 percent speed boost over the previous seventh-generation Kaby Lake chips.

The eighth-generation chips will be doing things a little differently from other generations. In the past, Intel has either used generational steps for introducing new chip architectures (say, the jump from 22nm to 14nm between Haswell and Broadwell) or to offer an improved version of the previous generation's architecture (like Skylake, which was an upgraded version of the 14nm node).

The eighth-generation chips, for the first time in the Core line will be doing a mixture of both. Getting announced today is a refreshed version of the Kaby Lake architecture that makes up the seventh-generation processors (built on the 14nm+ technology node), but later releases in the eight generation will offer the upcoming 14++ (Coffee Lake) and 10nm (Cannon Lake) technologies, too.