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KL-Feature2

Intel didn't just launch the new Core i7-7700K desktop CPU, it made a comprehensive update to its entire product line. The initial Kaby Lake mobile refresh was limited to a handful of SKUs; with this launch Intel is bringing out a larger number of cores intended for every cost point. The new chips are, for the most part, driblet-in replacements for the Skylake SKUs Intel launched in 2022 and 2022, though near of the models feature at least a minor clock jump over and in a higher place what Skylake offered.

The slideshow below steps through each of Intel's SKUs in some detail, but we'll give you the 10,000-foot overview. Kaby Lake is priced nearly identically to Skylake in nearly every case, simply the Core i5-7600K has a iii.8GHz base clock and a 4.2GHz turbo clock, whereas the Core i5-6700K was a 3.5GHz – 3.9GHz chip. These gains are preserved through most of the product stack; the 35W Core i5-7400T has a 2.4GHz base, 3GHz turbo, compared with the Core i5-6400T with its two.2GHz base of operations and 2.8GHz turbo.

There's a new classification attached to many of Intel'southward 15W and 28W CPUs. These new chips feature what Intel is calling "Iris Plus," pregnant they contain a 64MB EDRAM chip alongside the GPU core. The 128MB EDRAM cores that Intel has previously shipped with Skylake and Broadwell aren't being carried over to the Iris Plus line, at least not for at present. OEM uptake on these cores has never been high, fifty-fifty though they tin improve integrated graphics performance by almost 100%.

All of the new 7th-Generation fries back up VP9 hardware decode, also as supporting H.265 encode/decode completely in hardware. Equally a result, all of these cores are comparable with streaming 4K video from Netflix or any other service that agrees to use Windows PlayReady DRM via the Edge browser. Intel has already said information technology won't bring its EDRAM to any desktop quad-core SKUs this cycle, and so if you were hoping for a non-embedded chip with Iris Plus you lot'll have to expect for a Skylake-based core or consider the Broadwell-based Core i7-5775C, which does accept the 128MB cache.

Autonomously from improvements to media playback support, clock speed increases, and the Core i3-7350K (the beginning unlocked Cadre i3), the Kaby Lake refresh is a fairly standard update to Intel'south roadmap. A little more clock, a little more than performance, and not much to specifically get excited about unless y'all've been waiting on an upgrade that was just a lilliputian faster than your 5-7 year-old organisation.

Is it time for a new x86 architecture?

I'thou a fleck torn over Kaby Lake. On the one hand, information technology's a fine update as far every bit information technology goes. There's non much reason for Skylake owners to upgrade, only review results from the 7700K testify that information technology generally outperforms Devil's Canyon from 2022, to say aught of Sandy Bridge or fifty-fifty earlier chips. Squeezing an extra 8-10% out of Skylake in equivalent power envelopes is no minor accomplishment given how difficult it's been to motility the ball on x86 performance.

At the aforementioned time, however, Intel has been working with Sandy Bridge-derived architectures since 2022 and doesn't take much to prove for it — at least, not compared with previous rates of performance improvements. A dandy deal of this is due to simple physics and the intrinsic difficulty of designing a core that is more efficient, draws the same corporeality of power (or less, ideally) and provides increased operation without resorting to clock speed gains to deliver it. In a talk several years ago, old Intel Chief Architect Bob Colwell estimated that modern chips are 50-60x more efficient than the original 8086 — merely they clock 1,000x higher than that core (4GHz compared with 4MHz). For all the gains we've gotten from building better cores, the gains from clock speed are more than than an order of magnitude higher.

I mentioned this in the Core i7-7700K review, only it bears repeating: I accept admittedly no inside noesis that Intel is contemplating a new uarch and am not claiming it is. But it wouldn't surprise me if the company does get this road, especially if Zen proves competitive confronting the 7th Generation cadre family unit. With Apple breathing down its neck with the iPad Pro and its former enemy preparing to return to the loonshit, it's a good time to revisit sometime assumptions and come across if new tricks can be found to boost perf, cut power, and deliver a superior production.