Intel begins shipping Kaby Lake as next wave of CPUs nears

By Darren Allan

Kaby Lake CPUs, the successor to Skylake and seventh generation of Intel’s Core processors, have now begun shipping.

This fact was announced by chief executive Brian Krzanich, as Intel revealed its latest financial figures for Q2, although when he says the CPUs have started shipping, that means they’re going out to hardware manufacturers, so you won’t be able to pop to an online retailer and bag yourself one any time soon.

Rather, we should see PCs running the new processors a few months down the line (and naturally there will be mobile versions of the chips with a premium on power efficiency and helping your laptop battery last longer). Indeed, Microsoft’s next Surface devices, including the Surface Book 2, are expected to use Kaby Lake.

Third crack at 14nm

The new chip isn’t a big leap from Skylake in terms of the design, as it keeps the same 14nm process (which Broadwell also used – the previous generation to Skylake) and will fit the same socket.

However, it has been tweaked considerably to boost performance over Skylake – as you would hope, or there’d be little point in having a refresh. Exactly how much of a boost you’ll get, we’ll just have to …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components