During the Intel Keynote presentation today at IDF Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, demonstrated several upcoming Kaby Lake 2-in-1 prototypes from HP and Dell. While no concrete details about the 7th Generation of Intel Core products lines were given, we were offered a couple of bits of information to tide the hype until a full launch.

On the stage, support for HEVC Main10 Profile was announced with 7th Gen, although it was unclear if this was decode only or encode as well. This is still a step up from Skylake support, where Main10 required hybrid hardware/software decoding acceleration. Moving it into hardware for Kaby Lake will help with performance and power consumption, particularly of 4K content where HEVC vs. H.264 differences are bigger than Full-HD. The demo on stage showed GoPro software taking 4K data from six cameras and being able to switch between the content of each camera without stuttering or delay, on a 2-in-1 mobile device.

For gaming, we were treated to a demonstration of Overwatch being run off of the 7th Gen IGP. That being said, it was not mentioned what the resolution or quality the game was running at, and V-Sync was not enabled.

Intel clarified that the demos on the stage were from their highest performance CPUs, but the fact that only 2-in-1s were on display demonstrates that Kaby Lake will be focused on mobile first. The HP and Dell prototypes also add to the ASUS prototypes we saw at Computex earlier in the year. Intel stated that 7th Gen CPUs are already in the hands of partners, ready for production devices, and we should expect to see them in the hands of consumers this autumn.  Again, given the focus, it seems we will encounter Kaby Lake in mobile form factors (4W and 15W) before anything on desktop.

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  • melgross - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    I see nothing different in Zen than we've seen in older, highly touted AMD products, post Intel Netburst, which is to say, over promoted, and under performing.
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    That's because you've seen nothing yet. Don't expect miracles, but a very solid performer is not out of the question.
  • r3loaded - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    "Kaby Lake will be focused on mobile first"

    Expect to see yet another round of disappointingly small and incremental IPC improvements while prices get jacked up on the desktop side of things. We need Zen in the market more than ever.
  • saratoga4 - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    I'm fully expecting Zen to disappoint but really hoping I'm wrong so that there is some competition.
  • retrospooty - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    LOL, same here. Whatever a lesser scale of "cautiously optimistic" is... Deliberately doubtful?
  • extide - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    dangerously optimistic, lol
  • Morawka - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    Supposedly 40% IPS gains put it's IPC right at around Haswell. a 8 core haswell CPU is around $1k (one with overclocking) so if zen really is as good as haswell, then AMD have a real winner on their hands. This at the very least, will force intel to include more cores
  • lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    I believe it's about efficiency, more so than identical/better performance. Haswell ain't no slouch, it's only a tad bit slower than Skylake. If AMD manages a home run in efficiency in addition to a nice Polaris integrated GPU AND competitive pricing, then I'm all in on AMD.
  • Kjella - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    Here's a Skylake die shot:
    https://www.techpowerup.com/img/15-08-18/77a.jpg
    For those of us that use a GPU anyway for gaming we could have had a GPU-less 8-core chip at the size/price of a quad-core. By force-feeding the desktop market with IGPs they took the low end GPU market from AMD/nVidia instead. I hope AMD comes out with an all-CPU desktop oriented processor, if they do that and still can't compete there's really no hope for them.
  • Arnulf - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    HD 530 in i7-6700K works fine for me. I don't play much but it runs things like WoWS smoothly at VSync cap.

    I really loathed the extra fan and power consumption of a discrete GPU and would have gone Bristol Ridge -> Raven Ridge way if AMD actually wanted to take my money ...

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