The Intel Kaby Lake Processor Tech Briefing

On August 25, we received an exclusive tech briefing on the new 7th Generation Intel Core processor, formerly known as Kaby Lake. Kaby Lake is not a new microarchitecture, but a refresh of the Intel Skylake microarchitecture. Even then, it boasts the following improvements :

  • improved 14 nm process technology, yielding 12% higher clock speeds
  • 10-bit HEVC and 8-bit VP9 hardware encoding and decoding
  • Native HDCP 2.2 support
  • Four additional PCI Express 3.0 lanes from the PCH
  • Support for Intel Optane (3D XPoint) technology

For an in-depth understanding of the new 7th Generation Intel Core processors, check out this video we prepared from the Intel Kaby Lake tech briefing.

 

How Much Faster Are The Intel Kaby Lake CPUs?

Ultimately, the 7th Generation Intel Core processors will deliver 12-19% better performance over the 6th Generation Intel Core processors (formerly known as Intel Skylake), mainly due to higher clock speeds.

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That is probably not particularly exciting news for users of Intel Skylake or Broadwell (5th Generation Intel Core) processors. However, Intel is hoping that it will be enough to encourage users of old PCs (which they define as 5 years or older) to upgrade to the faster and more efficient Kaby Lake processors.

According to Intel, the 7th Generation Intel Core processors are 1.7X faster in work applications, 8.6X faster in working with 4K videos, and 3X faster in 3D games, compared to the 2nd Generation Intel Core processors launched 5 years ago.

The new video encoder in the 7th Generation Intel Core processors also allows them to be 15X faster at creating video highlights, and 6.8X faster at transcoding a 4K video to 1080p, than comparable 2nd Generation Intel Core processors.

 

Intel Kaby Lake Tech Briefing Slides

If you prefer to check out the slides in detail, here they are for your perusal :

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