Intel launches Kaby Lake, 7th-gen Core processor focuses on 4K

Intel today launched its “7th generation Core” line-up which is codenamed Kaby Lake. While it’s not a huge jump from the Skylake processors (considering it’s already the 3rd chip introduced on the 14nm process), Kaby Lake will have improved support for 4K, 360 videos and AR/VR applications thru its integrated GPU.

Kaby Lake’s integrated GPUs will have hardware-accelerated decoding/encoding of 10-bit HEVC/H.265 video streams. This means the load is shifted from the CPU to the GPU much like how NVidia’s CUDA works with video encoding.

Over-all performance improvement is just incremental with about 12-19% boost compared to the Skylake equivalent with almost similar performance improvements in the GPU (Intel HD Graphics 615 and HD Graphics 620).

The batch starts with an Intel Core m3-7Y30 with a base clock of 1.0GHz and Turbo Boost of 2.6GHz. That’s a slight increase on clock speed from current Skylake CPUs (while retaining the 4.5W TDP) in ultra thin laptops currently in the market. The fastest is an Intel Core i7-7Y75 with a base clock speed of 1.3GHz and Turbo Boost of 3.6GHz. All new CPUs will be dual-core with 4 threads but with DDR3 RAM support only.

The Kaby Lake processors will start rolling out this Q3 (September) and should be available in over 100 devices.