The Intel Core i7-8700 desktop processor had six cores. Intel Hyper-Threading basically doubles the core count to 12 threads. Core i7-8700 features 12 MB of L3 cache and runs at 3.2 GHz by default, but may be clocked up to 4.6 GHz depending on the workload. Intel built the Core i7-8700 using a 14 nm manufacturing process.

Hardware virtualization is offered on the Core i7-8700, which significantly enhances virtual machine performance. Additionally, IOMMU virtualization (PCI passthrough) is allowed, allowing guest virtual machines to directly access host hardware. This processor will run programs that use Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), which will improve performance for computationally intensive tasks. Besides AVX, Intel includes the latest AVX2 standard, but not AVX-512.