Intel Announces More Details of Kaby Lake

Intel detailed its seventh-generation Core processors, codenamed Kaby Lake, in 2016. The architecture was notable because it broke Intel’s long-running “tick-tock” rhythm of alternating process shrinks and new microarchitectures.

Kaby Lake remained on Intel’s 14 nm process and was closely related to Skylake. Improvements came from a refined manufacturing process, higher clock speeds, and a much stronger media engine. Hardware decoding and encoding support for formats such as HEVC and VP9 became increasingly important as 4K streaming video spread.

The generation illustrated a broader semiconductor problem: process-node transitions were becoming harder and slower. Intel’s 10 nm technology was delayed, forcing the company to extract additional performance from 14 nm across several product generations.