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"Kaby Lake" (14 nm)

Kaby Lake is the codename used by Intel for a processor microarchitecture which was announced on August 30, 2016. Like the preceding Skylake, Kaby Lake is produced using a 14 nanometer manufacturing process technology. Breaking with Intel's previous "tick-tock" manufacturing and design model, Kaby Lake represents the optimized step of the newer "process-architecture-optimization" model. Kaby Lake began shipping to manufacturers and OEMs in the second quarter of 2016, and mobile chips have started shipping while Kaby Lake (desktop) chips were officially launched on January 3, 2017. 

The major changes between the Haswell and Skylake architectures include the removal of the fully integrated voltage regulator (FIVR) introduced with Haswell. On the variants that will use a discrete Platform Controller Hub (PCH), Direct Media Interface (DMI) 2.0 is replaced by DMI 3.0, which allows speeds of up to 8 GT/s.

Architecture

Kaby Lake features the same CPU core and performance per MHz as Skylake. Features specific to Kaby Lake include:

• Increased clock speeds across all CPUs models (increased by up to 300 MHz)
• Faster clock speed changes (improved Speed Shift technology): it takes less time for the CPU to transition from one frequency to another one, e.g. from a low power state to a high performance state - consequently this may bring an increase in performance and responsiveness
• Improved graphics core: full hardware fixed function VP9/HEVC (including 4K@60fps/10bit) decoding; improved hardware HEVC encoding; full hardware fixed function VP9 8bit encoding; higher GPU clock speeds for select CPUs
• 200 series chipset (Union Point) on socket 1151 (Kaby Lake is compatible with 100 series chipset motherboards after a BIOS update)
• Up to 16 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from the CPU, 24 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from PCH
• Support for Intel Optane Technology (Optane is not supported if a Kaby Lake CPU is being used on a 100 series chipset motherboard)