Intel Begins Shipment Of Seventh Generation Core: Kaby Lake
by Brett Howse on July 20, 2016 10:55 PM EST
Intel had their Q2 earnings today, and while we’ll get to that shortly, some news came out of the earnings call that was interesting. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated on their earnings call that Intel is now shipping their 7th Generation Core processor, code named Kaby Lake.
Kaby Lake was not even a product not that long ago, but with Intel coming up against the laws of physics with process shrinks, they made the announcement a year ago that they would be adding more architectures per process shrink. The delays in moving to 22 nm and then 14 nm meant that they were missing the anticipated product launches for their OEMs, which left the OEMs with quarters where they would have no new products to sell. In an attempt to smooth out the timelines to a more reasonable cadence, while at the same time coming to grips with the complexity of moving to smaller and smaller processes, Intel announced Kaby Lake as a successor to Skylake, which would build on Skylake and offer additional architectural improvements.
This was big news at the time mostly because Intel’s previous Tick Tock strategy was so successful. To abandon it was certainly an important step for the company, but with Kaby Lake seemingly on-time for a fall launch this year, just a year after Skylake launched, points to the investment being the correct one.
When Intel says they are shipping, they of course mean they are shipping to their device manufacturer partners, so we should start seeing Kaby Lake based computers this fall.
Another interesting point brought up during the call was on yields. Intel has found itself in a situation where it’s inventory levels are higher than they would like them to be, and the answer to this was yields. Intel’s yields improved in Q1, and to quote Stacy J. Smith, Intel’s CFO and EVP, “Frankly, they got a lot better in Q2 as well” which is likely another reason why Kaby Lake is being delivered on-time.
We should learn more about Kaby Lake at Intel’s IDF which is coming up in mid-August.
Source: Intel Investor Call
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silverblue - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Considering we're talking about central processing units here, graphics processing units are hardly relevant.Off you pop now.
Michael Bay - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
AMD fails everywhere, it`s all good.yannigr2 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
@M BIf you want to pay $400 for the next 1X60 card and $300 for the next i3, then you can only hope for AMD going away. You could also hope that scientists will be able really soon to inject functional braincells to someone's head. You really need some of those.
Michael Bay - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Goodwill has its limits.bj_murphy - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Or move to Canada, those prices sound about right.JoeMonco - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Oooooooh. Your gonna get the panties of the AMD fangirls all twisted up with that comment.Don't you know that Zen is gonna be the second coming of Jesus?
Spunjji - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
So by your reading it's either agree with the idiotic statement or be a ravening fanbot? Don't mind me while I do neither and ignore you strange individuals.ikjadoon - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
But...if we look at it from AMD's estimates. They say it'll compete with an i7-5960X. That's 8 Haswell cores @ 3.5GHz. Nothing amazing in terms of IPC. Much more competitive than anything they have now, but it's still a 2016 CPU competing with a "meh IPC" 2014 CPU.sharath.naik - Sunday, July 24, 2016 - link
AMD never mentioned clock speed only IPC, Usually that's not by accident. it means that their clock speed will not match intel or their current generation CPUs. So the performance of their ZEN is a big question mark. IPC only means it can be power efficient, it does not mean it will match the speed.I am seeing a repeat of their rx 480 release. As promised good IPC but with clock speed so low it does not even compete against their own older generation GPUs
Michael Bay - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Of course it will, and we all will repent!11!!!