Even though Intel is trying to look beyond the PC market, the firm is undoubtedly still a PC company. Its CPUs continue to be the best in the x86 world and their process advantage still holds. After launching Skylake as their 6th generation successor to Broadwell last year, Intel is preparing for a Kaby Lake refresh for 2016. The i7-7700K, the top mainstream Kaby Lake CPU, has reportedly had its specifications leaked.
Kaby Lake is the third Intel CPU generation to use the 14nm process. Earlier in the year, Intel gave up on the idea of 2 processor generations per node. Instead, a third generation, in this case, Kaby Lake, will follow Haswell and Broadwell as the optimization phase. For this reason, I don’t expect much in terms of IPC, rather mostly efficiency and clock speed gains. There are actually 3 chips leaked today, the Core i7-7700K, Core i7-7500U and the Core M7-7Y75.
First off, the Core i7-7700K will feature 4 cores and 8 threads with 8 MB L3 cache, 256 KB of L2 cache and a 4.00 GHz internal memory controller. Clock speeds are similar to the i7 6700K with a peak boost clock of 4.2Ghz while the base clock is lower at 3.6Ghz. Given that the chip is an engineering sample and the maturity of the 14nm process, we can expect the base clock to be bumped up a bit at least. The chip should be compatible with 100 and 200 series motherboards with the LGA 1151 socket.
Finally, we have the mobile-oriented i7-7500U and the M7-7Y75. Both feature 4MB of L3 along with 2 cores and 4 threads. Clock speeds are decent at 2.70 GHz base and 2.90 GHz boost and 1.30 GHz base and 1.60 GHz boost respectively. We can expect these chips, along with the rest of Kaby Lake to arrive in 2H 2016, likely a bit before Zen does.
