Brian Krzanich, Intel’s CEO, confirmed today that Intel is shipping its 7th generation Core processors (codename Kaby Lake) to OEMs, and showed off the new processor’s video capabilities.
“We’re pleased to announce that we’re shipping already to our PC partners, and will launch with new devices to consumers this fall,” said Krzanich, during the keynote speech at the 2016 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. “It’s the highest performance CPU Intel has ever built.”
The sprawling keynote address barely mentioned Intel’s flagship product, focusing on everything from virtual reality to cars. But there was a few minutes left for discussing the upcoming line of processors, and the focus was on the audio visual world.
“I am happy to report [7th generation processors] are meeting all my 4K needs beautifully,” an Intel rep at the presentation stated, adding the on-board acceleration can play “the highest quality Hollywood premium 4K content on the market today” without issues.
The point? Intel’s 7th generation Core new processor can play 4K footage without slowing down. The same was true for content creation: 4K footage was shown being edited in near real-time on a laptop.
“We can look at individual videos, put them together, add music, all from our backpack,” said the presenter.
The keynote also showed off the on-board graphics capability of the new processor generation. Blizzard’s popular new shooter Overwatch was played on a Dell XPS with a 7th-gen processor and on-board graphics. The game didn’t look like it was on its highest detail settings, but we’ve tried to play Overwatch on a 6th-generation Intel Core laptop before, with poor results. Handling Overwatch would be a nice improvement.
Kaby Lake has native USB 3.1 support, native HDCP 2.2 support, native Thunderbolt 3 support, and a thermal design power of up to 95 watts. It’s also built on a 14-nanometer production process, the same as Skylake and Broadwell (5th-gen and 6th-gen Core) before it.
