Intel’s Kaby Lake Chips Designed to Drive Thinner, Lighter PCs

Here’s a look at Intel’s Kaby Lake 7th Generation Core Processors, designed to help spur the development of PCs for the so-called “immersive internet.”

Navin Shenoy, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCG), holds a 7th Generation Core processor at an event during the recent Intel Developer Forum. The chips are Intel’s third 14nm products, following Broadwell and Skylake. (photo courtesy of Intel)

Intel CCG Vice President Chris Walker shows off a thin-and-light system powered by Kaby Lake chips. Some new systems will be as thin as a smartphone, officials said. Intel officials expect more than 100 systems running on the 7th Generation Cores to begin hitting the market this fall. They will be followed by PCs for enthusiasts in January 2017. (photo courtesy of Intel)

A wafer of Kaby Lake chips at the IDF event. The new Core chips are based on what officials call the 14nm+ process, and come with such enhancements as an improved FinFET transistor design for better performance and efficiency, a new video engine and Intel’s Speed Shift technology for accelerate over-clocking.

Also on display was Asus’ T305 detachable system that is thin (6.9 mm) and light (1.5 pounds). The new Core chips come in the Y-series that run at 1.0GHz to 1.3GHz and consume 4.5 watts of power, and the U-series (2.4GHz to 2.7GHz and up to 15 watts). Both are dual-core, four-thread processors.

HP Inc.’s Envy x360 is shown running 4K video on its 15.6-inch screen. The new video system in Kaby Lake offers dedicated support for 4K HEVC encoding and decoding and VP9 decoding for better video quality and reduced bandwidth needs.

The 13-inch laptop is 9.9mm thin. The new Kaby Lake chips offer up to 12 percent faster productivity performance and up to 19 percent faster web performance than its Skylake predecessors.

According to Intel officials, gamers will see a threefold improvement in graphics performance compared to a five-year-old PC, enabling them to play such games as Overwatch anywhere on the thin-and-light laptop.