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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HardwareDufus - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
I was only stating that the Core / Core 2 Duo architecture used the P6 Core as a starting point, as opposed to the Netburst Core as a foundation.Even Conroe was all new, as the first iteration of the Core architecture. Interesting products like Pentium-M demonstrated for Intel it was better to trash Netburst as it was running out of steam and re-visit P6 as a starting point for future architectures. But Conroe was not P6... it was Core.
But yeah, Sandy Bridge was a huge step change in the development of the Core architecture.
ZeDestructor - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Conroe is somewhat interesting.. most of it was Yonah + SSE3/SSSE3, which was itself more or less just Dothan*2. In terms of relationships, Conroe is just far, far closer to P6 than SNB is to Nehalem or Westmere.ikjadoon - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
I haven't heard these words in a long time....yuhong - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
"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."I wonder why they are still doing one year product cycles.
r3loaded - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Because OEMs still insist on selling computers like it's 1999. Same reason you see AMD and Nvidia rebranding their existing GPUs on parts destined only for OEMs.A5 - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Yep. OEMs want bigger numbers for the Back To School season, so you get a bunch of rebrand/clock bump announcements in June/July/August. It's always been silly, even more so now.Michael Bay - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
At this point I`m more interested in Apollo Lake and what OEMs make with it. That i3-380um/atrocious lenovo display combo is almost five years old now, time to upgrade.YazX_ - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Intel should really slow down, i still have my 3770k ivy bridge OCed to 4.5Ghz, i see no reason to upgrade, the CPU is still giving a top tier performance, great in all applications and in games it is like 50% utilized.euler007 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Good for you, you probably should invest in a better GPU then. Other people have compute need, a lot of the software I use at work are bottlenecked by single thread performance and throwing additional cores at it doesn't help. Every time intel increases performance by 10% can save my employees many minutes per operation (working on datasets in the gigabytes).euler007 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
I really need to start proofreading my posts.