Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing

Close to the Metal Ep. 10: Another year, another Intel generation

By
Close to the Metal Ep. 10: Another year, another Intel generation
When you’re planning CPU releases, you have to plan pretty far out. So when Intel releases a new processor generation, it’s not that much of a surprise, because they announced it at least a year prior. Still, Intel’s Seventh Generation Kaby Lake chips provide some notable benefits over their Skylake counterparts, even if they’re a step in a different direction for the company.

While there are a few under-the-hood changes, improved 4K video playback and editing capabilities are definitely the flashiest new feature debuting in Kaby Lake. With the introduction of the New Media Engine, a new section of execution units built from the company’s integrated graphics hardware. They’re specifically built for decoding video, like HEVC and VP9, at the hardware level, improving both performance and power efficiency.

Related

There’s a small boost in speed as well, with Intel quoting a 12 percent performance boost in general productivity from the Core i7-6500U to the Core i7-7500U, with the number reaching as high as 19 percent in web browsing benchmarks.

Kaby Lake also brings with it a change in nomenclature to the lower-power chips. What were formerly Core m5 and Core m7 chips are now full Core i5 and Core i7 models, but with the same low 4.5 watt TDP, as long as “they perform like an i7.”

But a change in Intel’s process is looming over this generation, and it’s going to put a lot of pressure on it. Starting in 2007, Intel employed the Tick-Tock model, where the company would produce an architecture, then shrink it down, then produce a new architecture at that size, repeating the process every year or two. But last year, things had to shift as Intel was unable to keep up with the mounting pressures of ever-shrinking hardware. Kaby Lake is the first generation to break the mold, as the last phase a of a three-part cycle.

These chips will start showing up first in high-end laptops by the end of the year, before they start trickling down to the more basic mobile computers. We’ve been seeing a lot more laptops as of late with screens over 1,920 x 1,080, so improved battery life doing what most people do on a laptop – play on the web and watch movies – is a decent quality of life improvement.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Brad Bourque
Brad Bourque
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brad Bourque is a native Portlander, devout nerd, and craft beer enthusiast. He studied creative writing at Willamette…
How Intel could win the GPU war this year
Intel Arc A580 graphics card on a pink background.

Intel faced an uphill climb with Arc Alchemist, and it looks like it might have another fight ahead with its next-gen Battlemage GPUs. The competition is always fierce, and AMD and Nvidia have big plans for the year ahead.

Despite the clouds that loom on the horizon, Intel might still surprise us with Battlemage -- in a good way. Here's where Intel Arc Battlemage is currently at, and why it might have a shot at being one of the best GPUs of the year.
Déjà vu
Prior to the release of Intel Arc Alchemist, one of the main complaints was that the general public was kept in the dark a lot of the time. The release date was pushed back more than once, and the information about the GPUs was fairly scarce compared to the constant hype we've all grown used to with Nvidia and AMD leaks.

Read more
Intel may have a monster new CPU coming soon
Pins on Intel Core i9-12900K.

The Core i9-13900KS was a milestone product for Intel, as it was the first consumer processor capable of reaching an impressive 6GHz straight out of the box. This year, Team Blue is expected to take it up a notch.

A recent leak reported by Tom's Hardware has unveiled crucial details about Intel's upcoming flagship CPU, the Core i9-14900KS. If these leaked benchmarks are to be believed, this beast of a processor will boast eight powerful P-cores alongside 16 efficient E-cores, offering a total of 32 threads and a whopping 68MB of cache. But what truly sets it apart is its clock speeds.

Read more
A major era in Intel chip technology may be coming to an end
An Intel processor over a dark blue background.

Intel's next-generation Arrow Lake chips are said to be coming out later this year, but we don't know much about them just yet. However, a new leak shows us that two crucial features may be missing from the next-gen CPU lineup: hyperthreading and support for the AVX-512 extension. If Intel is ditching hyperthreading, it's not entirely unexpected, but it might make it trickier for even its best processors to beat AMD.

Hyperthreading allows physical cores in Intel processors to perform two tasks simultaneously, improving efficiency and performance in multi-threaded applications. Intel first introduced it in 2002, but it hasn't used the technology in every generation of its CPUs between then and now. The tech was all but gone from client processors for many years following its launch, although it was still present in certain models. Since then, Intel has selectively implemented HT across its product stack. In the last few years, it became a staple, especially in midrange and high-end chips.

Read more