Intel ceases the production of Kaby Lake desktop processors

On October 08, 2019, in a product change notification, Intel announced that it would be ceasing the production of its 7th generation Many Lake Processors. Since 8th gen updates arrived, Kaby Lake processor hasn’t been on the best CPUs for gaming list, however, it was still available for purchase. The last order date is 24th April 2020 which is non-removable and non-cancelable. The last shipment date is the October 09, 2020. So by this time next year, there will officially no more new Kaby Lake Processors out in the market.

Kaby Lake Processor was first unveiled in January 2017. Kaby Lake broke with Intel’s preceding tick-tock design model for a newer design model called process-architecture-optimization which kept the same 14nm manufacturing process, however it was tweaked and improved and was called 14mn+ manufacturing process. Kaby Lake was also Intel’s first processor to complete with AMD’s first generation of Ryzen processor. Where Kaby featured four cores, AMD’s Ryzen came with eight cores. However, Intel would release it’s Coffee Lake 6 months later to keep pace with AMD’s higher thread and core. It was also the first Intel processor which lacked official driver support for a Windows version older than the Windows 10.

The affected products which were listed on the product change notification announced on 8th October are:

1. Marketing Name- Intel Core i5-6500 Processor   

Product Code- CM8066201920404

1. Marketing Name- Intel Core i5-6500 Processor   

Product Code- CM8066201920404

1. Marketing Name- Intel Core i7-6700 Processor

Product Code- CM8067702868219

1. Marketing Name- Intel Core i7-6700 Processor

Product Code- CM8066201920103

1. Marketing Name- Intel Core i5-7500 Processor   

Product Code- CM8067702868012

1. Marketing Name- Intel Core i5-7500T Processor   

Product Code- CM806770286811

1. Marketing Name- Intel Core i7-7700 Processor   

Product Code- CM8067702868314

1. Marketing Name- Intel Core i7-7700T Processor   

Product Code- CM8067702868416

Also, the production of all 7th generation Core i3, Pentium and Celeron desktop processors is to be ceased.

When compared to Skylake Processors, Kaby Lake had faster clock speed changes and increased clock speeds on some model, for instance, The Core i7-6700K had a base clock of 4.0GHz, whereas the Core i7-7700K has a base clock of 4.2GHz. Moreover, the 7th generation processors added support for Intel Optane memory on motherboard featuring a 200-series chipset. 

Intel also announced that it would discontinue the production of the Kaby Lake processors with AMD’s Radeon Vega graphics. Intel said it is trying to refocus its product portfolio and it’s 10th generation processors are built on the new Gen11 graphics architecture and have Iris Plus architecture. Looks like Intel will be using its own integrated graphics solution from now on.

Image Source – Flickr