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Intel 7th Generation Core "Kaby Lake" and 200-series Chipset Platform Outlined

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Intel's tick-tock product development cycle is disturbed. The cadence of launching a new CPU microarchitecture on a given silicon fab process, miniaturizing it to a smaller fab process, and then launching an even newer micro-architecture on that process; is about to change with the company's 7th generation Core "Kaby Lake" processor. When launched, it would be the third microarchitecture built on the company's 14 nm process, besides "Skylake" (current new architecture) and "Broadwell" (miniaturization of "Haswell" to 14 nm.) Some of the very first documents related to Kaby Lake began to move about, making news along the way. The architecture is scheduled to launch along with its companion 200-series chipset some time in 2016.

To begin with, Core "Kaby Lake" will continue to be built on the LGA1151 package, and will likely be backwards compatible with existing 100-series chipset motherboards with a firmware update. From what we get to understand from leaked material, it will not be a vastly newer architecture than Skylake, at least not of the kind Skylake was to Broadwell. There are still CPU performance enhancements on offer, an "enhanced full-range BClk overclocking," which could mean improved overclocking on chips with upwards-locked multipliers (although we won't get our hopes too high and call it a return of the BClk overclocking era). A bulk of the R&D will fall into improving the integrated graphics, to support multiple 5K displays, 10-bit HVEC and VP9 hardware-acceleration; platform-integrated Thunderbolt 3, and platform interface support for Intel Optane (3D XPoint memory).



Like its predecessor, "Kaby Lake" will feature an integrated memory controller that supports both DDR4 and DDR3 memory. It will support faster DDR4-2400 natively; and DDR3L-1600. DMI 3.0 (physical PCI-Express 3.0 x4) will continue to be the chipset bus. The 200-series chipset, codenamed "Union Point," in its topmost variant, will feature native support for Intel Optane SSDs, and will feature greater port-flexibility among its downstream PCIe lanes. It will feature Rapid Storage Technology support for PCIe storage devices. By the time it launches, NVMe will achieve greater presence in the market.

Since it will be built on the existing 14 nm process, TDP of "Kaby Lake" chips will be similar to existing "Skylake" ones - 35W and 65W for dual- and quad-core desktop chips; with 95W for enthusiast-K variants of the desktop chips. Elsewhere in the lineup, there will be 8 top-level variants of "Kaby Lake," four of which will launch in Q3-2016, and four in early-2017, as incremental lineup upgrades.

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I must be going crazy, I still see USB 2.0 and I do not see USB 3.1 Gen2 anywhere.
 
So...
-no USB 3.1.
-still supporting DDR3L (Skylake motherboards seem to be few and far between).
-enthusiast processors are 95W TDP instead of 91W

I'm pretty happy I didn't wait for Kaby Lake.
 
I seriously don't understand why Intel even bothers with the GPU core on the k model chips. Pretty sure 100% of the people who buy those chips have discrete GPUs in their system.
 
I seriously don't understand why Intel even bothers with the GPU core on the k model chips. Pretty sure 100% of the people who buy those chips have discrete GPUs in their system.
You are wrong, what if someone uses CPU for encoding or virtualization where iGPU comes handy but do not need dGPU?
 
You are wrong, what if someone uses CPU for encoding or virtualization where iGPU comes handy but do not need dGPU?

They wouldn't be using a k chip for that.
 
- 200 series chipset and they've barely released the 100 series
- USB 2.0 in 2015 (almost 2016). Daym.
- what will they improve with CPU's when 6700K is already clocked so high only way they can make it better is to add more cores or drastically improve IPC. Which I highly doubt it'll happen.
- lastly, zero actual new innovations

AMD, get that Zen out and kick Intel in the lazy ass. This is getting ridiculous.
 
AMD, get that Zen out and kick Intel in the lazy ass. This is getting ridiculous.

That and the problems with a new node. It's just filler before ... 10nm is it? Also, these chips will be a little bit more expensive than Skylake.
 
Availability of the skylake CPUs and motherboards is quite sketchy and now already rumours of a replacement platform :banghead:.

That's a very good point actually. The Pentiums were released only like two months ago.
 
Availability of the skylake CPUs and motherboards is quite sketchy and now already rumours of a replacement platform :banghead:.
Kaby Lake was known about the time Skylake launched. There just wasn't many details about it other than it was going to be made on 14nm.
 
What does "supports xyz memory speed natively" mean? Or what's the difference between this and Skylake boards that already support it (unnatively?0?

Availability of the skylake CPUs and motherboards is quite sketchy and now already rumours of a replacement platform :banghead:.
I don't know what country you live in, but in this banana republic there are TONS of 100 series boards and Skylake CPUs are everything but unavailable.
 
It seems that opting for slightly more expensive X platforms is still a much better decision. The X58 lasted me for ages. I'm now on X99 and I'm expecting the same from it. Z170 is replaced few months after release. Which is just hilarious.
 
They wouldn't be using a k chip for that.
Why not, I myself wouldn't buy K chip and Z motherboard because I do not support paying more just so Intel doesn't lock the multiplier and because I do not like large heatsinks but someone else can buy K chip and Z motherboard and can do a lot of things that do not require dGPU.

Plus AMD proved with HSA that iGPU can speed up the tasks which would normally use only CPU part of the APU.
 
What does "supports xyz memory speed natively" mean? Or what's the difference between this and Skylake boards that already support it (unnatively?0?


I don't know what country you live in, but in this banana republic there are TONS of 100 series boards and Skylake CPUs are everything but unavailable.
I live in India, I tried to get hold of i7-6700k through my usual computer dealer and its wasnt available. I was told they could get me any of the i5 cpus. So I checked newegg(as they ship to India) even they dont seem to that chip in stock. Also Z170 based motherboards running DDR3 are very difficult to get hold off.
 
So is this tick-tick-tock, or tick-tock-tock, or skippity-do-dah? Because it doesn't seem like anything to get excited about. Perhaps it is the PR trick to replace a faulty i7 line-up?! What I mean by that is the practical unavailability of so many i7's means there must be some production/design issue that this new CPU/chipset combo hopes to address.
 
Take USB 2.0 and DDR3 out to the shed, it's about time someone put them out of their misery. DDR3 I can understand, but USB 2.0 is backwards compatible ffs. But of course Intel won't do it, they want to milk us for everything we got. But you can't blame them for getting their IGP in line with the current resolution boom this past year. Their graphics before Skylake had abysmal performance (still kinda does actually). They have to get with the times and offer an option that can actually do 4K without looking like a slideshow. So I guess it's in their best interest to travel down this road of theirs, however bad it might suck for us enthusiasts.
This is why it's in everyone's best interest that AMD puts up a decent if not competitive fight against whatever Intel offers at the time of Zen's release. When AMD puts out their new APUs based on the Zen-architecture, that's when we'll see some impressive performance gaps between them and Intel's IGP for sure.
 
I seriously don't understand why Intel even bothers with the GPU core on the k model chips. Pretty sure 100% of the people who buy those chips have discrete GPUs in their system.
that's my point....

It seems that opting for slightly more expensive X platforms is still a much better decision. The X58 lasted me for ages. I'm now on X99 and I'm expecting the same from it. Z170 is replaced few months after release. Which is just hilarious.
welcome to the "new world..."
 
I hope Zen puts up a good fight just to make intel try a little bit harder, i think they are relaxing a bit to much.
 
If they'll scale down Zen they'll also make a pretty good competition against these.
 
Zen is their planned flagship, allegedly a 16 threads CPU. Scaling down means they'll chop it up and make mid and low end processors from the technology used in Zen CPU's.
 
Ok, USB 2.0 - why not? It's still plenty fast enough for mice, keyboards etc. and it takes up very little space as far as the chipset is concerned, where USB 3.0 and 3.1 is taking up a lot more space to implement.

USB 3.1 gen 2 - Intel wants to sell its Thunderbolt 3.0 chips for this, just as they're doing to Gigabyte and Asus now. If Intel can charge $10 for another chip, why wouldn't they? They're a business after all. It took three years for USB 3.0 to be part of Intel's chipsets if I don't remember wrong and then we got a massive two ports... Expect the same with USB 3.1 gen 2.

Note that these chips won't launch until Q3/Q4 2016, so it's still going to be quite a wait...

38462
 
Why not, I myself wouldn't buy K chip and Z motherboard because I do not support paying more just so Intel doesn't lock the multiplier and because I do not like large heatsinks but someone else can buy K chip and Z motherboard and can do a lot of things that do not require dGPU.

Plus AMD proved with HSA that iGPU can speed up the tasks which would normally use only CPU part of the APU.

If real virtualization is a big deal, you would not use a k chip, hell you wouldn't even use a normal i3, i5, i7. Xeon is what you want for the virtualization direct i/o. Though now that I think of it, non k chips might have direct i/o virtualization.
 
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