Desktop Kaby Lake CPUs Appear in Intel Documents

Intel's own documents spoil the desktop Kaby Lake, 200-series chipset surprise

By Brad Bourque October 31, 2016

Intel 7th Generation Core — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The road to new processors is paved with dozens of little information leaks. Today’s leak, which reportedly comes from Intel’s product chain announcements, lets us in on the SKUs and base clock speeds of the upcoming desktop Kaby Lake chips. They won’t show up until early next year, but that should mean they’re already on their way to OEMs for inclusion in forthcoming systems.

We don’t have all of the pertinent info, so we included each chip’s Skylake counterpart, and that chip’s details, in order to help see exactly where each CPU falls in the grand scheme of the Kaby Lake rollout.

SKU	Base Clock	Skylake Counterpart	Base Clock	Boost Clock	Cores	TDP
Core i5-7400T	2.4GHz	Core i5-6400T	2.2GHz	2.8GHz	4 (4)	35W
Core i5-7400	3.0GHz	Core i5-6400	2.7GHz	3.3GHz	4 (4)	65W
Core i5-7500T	2.7GHz	Core i5-6500T	2.7GHz	3.5GHz	4 (4)	35W
Core i5-7500	3.4GHz	Core i5-6500	3.2GHz	3.6GHz	4 (4)	65W
Core i5-7600T	2.8GHz	Core i5-6600T	2.7GHz	3.5GHz	4 (4)	35W
Core i5-7600	3.5GHz	Core i5-6600	3.3GHz	3.9GHz	4 (4)	65W
Core i5-7600K	3.8GHz	Core i5-6600K	3.5GHz	3.9GHz	4 (4)	91W
Core i7-7700T	2.9GHz	Core i7-6700T	2.8GHz	3.6GHz	4 (8)	35W
Core i7-7700	3.6GHz	Core i7-6700	3.4GHz	4.0GHz	4 (8)	65W
Core i7-7700K	4.2GHz	Core i7-6700K	4.0GHz	4.2GHz	4 (8)	91W

Not much has changed between Skylake and Kaby Lake, at least on paper. There are slightly higher clock speeds, except on the lower-end T chips, which have a much lower TDP. The only chips that will concern PC builders are the Core i5-7600K and Core i7-7700K, the two unlocked chips in the series, which should fall right around the same price point as their Skylake counterparts. The Product Change Notification document also includes a Xeon workstation chip, the E3-1205v6, which appears because it’s part of the same manufacturing location change that affects the other chips.

Of course, new chips also means new chipsets, and a related document features the names of the new 200-series chipsets. Nothing groundbreaking here, the Z270 chipset is targeted at enthusiasts who want to overclock their K series chips. Q270, H270, and H250 fit mostly the same bill as the H150, H170, and Q170 chipsets, which lack overclocking but still hold midrange features and support. The B250 is the budget-friendly chipset option, and the one a lot of pre-built manufacturers will reach for. Don’t worry, your 100-Series chipset will still work after a BIOS update, if you wanted to upgrade from Skylake to Kaby Lake for whatever reason.

The only mystery on the chipset front is the inclusion of the X299 platform. The previous X99 platform supported both the Haswell-E and Broadwell-E chips, but those usually don’t appear until later in the release cycle. If there’s a Skylake-E chip on the way, we certainly don’t know anything about it.

While the info comes directly from Intel’s domain, a little skepticism is always a good idea when it comes to leaks. It’s very unlikely there will be changes to the SKUs before release, but you never know.

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