It’s been a wild year with Skylake. Personally, I’m using a Skylake rig right now, and I really love what it offers. It’s real silent and maintains the temperature really well too – but Intel is definitely not stopping there. Introducing the brand new Kaby Lake family of processors – Intel’s 7th generation of Intel Core technology.
In short, there’s a few things that Intel focuses on when it comes to the brand new Kaby Lake architecture:
- New focus on VR
- Improved fin profile (relating to FinFET design)
- New media blocks for 4K content
- Has hardware accelerated codecs for an overall superior video streaming/editing process
- HEVC 10-bit and VP9 codec included
- Decreased 4K 10-bit HEVC video playback power consumption from 10.2W to 0.5W (!!!)
- Decrease 4K VP9 power consumption from 5.8W to 0.8W (!!!)
- Has hardware accelerated codecs for an overall superior video streaming/editing process
- Comes with Turbo Boost 2.0 and Intel Speed Shift for better performance and efficiency
- New Y-series of processors for “thin and sleek designs” (presumably fanless designs)
- New U-series of low-powered processors for mobility
Personally, I can see why Intel is integrating new media blocks for 4K content in the chip itself. It’s more or less the same concept as SoCs are concerned, as explained here. Much faster encoding and decoding, and even higher efficiency levels.
What surprised me though was the decrements of power consumption in both 4K HEVC 10-bit and 4K VP9 videos. They are a big deal – and soon enough, even Twitch or Facebook will adopt this standard and enable 4K videos through these two codecs. That said, any Kaby Lake users will benefit from this, because of its ultra low power consumption and much faster codec.
For further details, you can check out the gallery of pictures right here. There’s a lot to take in, as Kaby Lake is quite an upgrade from Skylake.
Intel also provided us another set of slides – this time comparing the new Kaby Lake with the older generations of Intel Core series processors.
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