Intel begins shipping Kaby Lake CPUs to device makers

Intel officially began shipping out its Kaby Lake processors out to device makers this week, meaning we may see the 7th generation Intel Core CPUs popping up in PCs and laptops in a few months time. Intel confirmed that its Kaby Lake CPUs had begun going out to OEMs this week during the company's Q2 earnings call.

Kaby Lake is the first Intel CPU to break the ‘tick-tock' cycle, which was retired this year. Going forward, Intel will be using a three year cycle for its process technology to get the most out of each node going forward. Kaby Lake will be the third and 14nm chip, then in 2017, Intel will make the jump to 10nm with Canonlake, we will then be on 10nm technology until 2020.

Kaby Lake is a 95 watt TDP CPU and comes with native support for several technologies, including USB 3.1, HDCP 2.2 and Thunderbolt 3. This is an ‘optimization' CPU, so it builds on the technology introduced in Broadwell and Skylake, with that in mind, it is fair to speculate that Kaby Lake won't bring a huge leap in performance compared to last year's Skylake CPUs.

We have already heard that Microsoft is waiting on Kaby Lake to arrive before revamping its Surface tablet line in early 2017. We may see some Kaby Lake PCs pop-up before then in the later months of 2016 but we won't know for sure until some announcements are made.

KitGuru Says: Intel's final batch of 14nm processors are starting to make their way out to OEMs, so we might get a look at what Kaby Lake can do in a few months time. Are any of you waiting on new processors to launch before upgrading? 

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