Kaby Lake is on its way, marking the 7th generation of desktop processors from Intel, and to get you excited much of the product lineup details have been leaked by Chinese sources. Based around the popular Skylake architecture, Kaby Lake will offer further optimisations and performance over the current crop of hardware for various platforms, although today’s leaks focus on the desktop range.
There will be two variants, one for the HEDT market, and one for the mainstream market. HEDT Kaby Lake-X will run on LGA 2066 alongside the Skylake-X CPUs, while mainstream will be known as Kaby Lake-S and run on the LGA 1151 socket, although don’t expect them to be compatible with Skylake sockets, as they’ll need the 200-series chipsets, ouch.
At the top end, the 7700K, which offers 4 cores and multi-threading, although there’s a 7600K which offers unlocked multipliers, but comes without the multi-threading. Following that, the 7700, which can’t be overclocked, and comes with a lower core clock and TDP.
The none K models are actually known as the “S Series” and come in four standard models, with or without multi-threading, while the T Series offer much lower TDP and clocks, making them suitable for the low-powered PC market and more compact devices. All of the new CPUs are quad-core, while only the top three offer multi-threading.
It’s not known how fast (or slow) the chips are, but usual safe estimates are up to 10% improvement over the last generation. According to sources, it looks like we can expect a small delay on the release, and the hardware is now set to launch in early 2017, just a few months after the mobile form factor release.
