Intel i5 7600K Performance Leaked

In just a few short months, Intel will be launching their new desktop platform. Kaby Lake will be arriving on January 5th 2017 with the i5 7600K and i7 7700K along with other non-overclocking SKUs. In a surprise twist, a review for the unlocked i5 7600K has surfaced online from China. This is quite a surprise as the NDA has for sure not lifted and this is months ahead of the launch. It also means that Intel has had the chips ready for quite some time.

As expected, Kaby Lake is just a minor tweak of Skylake with higher clock speeds. The i5 7600K features a base clock of 3.8 GHz and boosts 4.2 GHz with 6MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 91W.The iGPU is the improved HD 630 with 24 Execution Units and higher clock speeds compared to HD 530. Of course, the new 200 series platform will be used with a few yet to be known new features.

From the benchmarks, you can see that Intel hasn’t improved IPC at all, While the 7600K features about 9-10% performance uplift compared to the 6600K, the gains all come from the increased stock clock speeds. One bonus though is that due to the new 14nm+ process, the clock speed gains barely increase power consumption which is nice. For mobile users, this means more time spent at boost clocks, better battery life and higher boost speed. Unfortautnely, this leaves desktop users without much of an upgrade over Skylake.

With Tick Tock, we sometimes got architectural changes even during the off years. This has meant IPC has improved every generation since Tick Tock was introduced. With PAO, the optimization stage and process stage won;t have any IPC improvements at all if Kaby Lake is the new standard. This means for most desktop users, upgrading every 3 years or 6 years may become the new cycle.