Kaby Lake CPUs
Intel’s Kaby Lake CPUs were ‘officially’ launched today. Kaby Lake is a marked change from Intel’s old Tick/Tock release schedule. They are instead moving to Process/Architecture/Optimization. This ‘optimization’ release looks to offer few improvements over the 6th generation Skylake chips:
Like the Devil’s Canyon refresh of Haswell, Kaby Lake desktop is but a mere clock speed boost disguised under the nomenclature of a new CPU generation. From an IPC standpoint, there’s nothing to tell Kaby Lake apart from Skylake. The one feature that might have proved interesting—support for Optane memory—is unlikely to be put to use until late 2017.
As a Mac user, I mostly ignore Intel’s high-end CPU SKUs. That said, when happens in the high end can also have implications for their mobile chips. If Intel can’t iterate on their chips, Apple can’t ship machines with updated hardware.
[Source] annotation mine
Curiously, it’s worth noting that while several U series chips (like those used in the MacBook Air) are present in the Kaby Lake lineup, the only Y chip (used in the 12” Macbook) is an m3. Apple’s MacBook lineup currently has m3, m5, and m7 chips. Given this, I’m curious if the 12” Macbook will be updated any time soon.
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