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KL-Feature2

Intel didn't but launch the new Core i7-7700K desktop CPU, it made a comprehensive update to its unabridged product line. The initial Kaby Lake mobile refresh was express to a handful of SKUs; with this launch Intel is bringing out a larger number of cores intended for every price bespeak. The new fries are, for the near part, drop-in replacements for the Skylake SKUs Intel launched in 2015 and 2016, though most of the models feature at least a small clock leap over and to 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 nigh identically to Skylake in virtually every case, but the Cadre i5-7600K has a 3.8GHz base clock and a four.2GHz turbo clock, whereas the Cadre i5-6700K was a 3.5GHz – three.9GHz chip. These gains are preserved through almost of the product stack; the 35W Core i5-7400T has a 2.4GHz base, 3GHz turbo, compared with the Core i5-6400T with its 2.2GHz base and 2.8GHz turbo.

At that place'due south a new nomenclature fastened to many of Intel's 15W and 28W CPUs. These new fries feature what Intel is calling "Iris Plus," meaning they incorporate a 64MB EDRAM chip alongside the GPU cadre. 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 now. OEM uptake on these cores has never been high, fifty-fifty though they can improve integrated graphics operation by virtually 100%.

All of the new 7th-Generation chips support VP9 hardware decode, equally well as supporting H.265 encode/decode completely in hardware. As 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 it won't bring its EDRAM to any desktop quad-core SKUs this cycle, so if you were hoping for a non-embedded fleck with Iris Plus you'll have to look for a Skylake-based core or consider the Broadwell-based Core i7-5775C, which does have the 128MB cache.

Apart from improvements to media playback support, clock speed increases, and the Core i3-7350K (the first unlocked Core i3), the Kaby Lake refresh is a adequately standard update to Intel's roadmap. A little more clock, a little more performance, and not much to specifically get excited virtually unless you lot've been waiting on an upgrade that was just a footling faster than your 5-vii year-sometime arrangement.

Is it time for a new x86 architecture?

I'thou a bit torn over Kaby Lake. On the one paw, it'south a fine update as far as it goes. There's not much reason for Skylake owners to upgrade, just review results from the 7700K show that it generally outperforms Devil'southward Canyon from 2014, to say cypher of Sandy Bridge or even earlier fries. Squeezing an actress 8-x% out of Skylake in equivalent ability envelopes is no pocket-size achievement given how hard it's been to movement the ball on x86 performance.

At the same time, nevertheless, Intel has been working with Sandy Bridge-derived architectures since 2011 and doesn't accept much to show for information technology — at least, not compared with previous rates of performance improvements. A groovy bargain of this is due to elementary 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 performance without resorting to clock speed gains to deliver it. In a talk several years ago, sometime Intel Principal Architect Bob Colwell estimated that modern chips are 50-60x more than efficient than the original 8086 — but they clock 1,000x higher than that core (4GHz compared with 4MHz). For all the gains we've gotten from building improve cores, the gains from clock speed are more an club of magnitude higher.

I mentioned this in the Core i7-7700K review, only it bears repeating: I have absolutely no inside noesis that Intel is contemplating a new uarch and am non claiming it is. But it wouldn't surprise me if the company does go this route, particularly if Zen proves competitive against the seventh Generation cadre family. With Apple animate down its neck with the iPad Pro and its old enemy preparing to return to the arena, it'due south a good time to revisit old assumptions and run across if new tricks can exist found to boost perf, cut power, and deliver a superior product.