Intel’s Unveils 7th Gen Intel Core Processor

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Intel has unveiled its 7th generation Intel Core family of processors today. The company is launching three Kaby Lake-Y parts on the 14nm+ process technology for high-end tablets, notebooks and 2-in-1 devices. With desktop CPUs coming in January, the focus today is on the new mobile processors that, according to Intel, deliver "richer experiences, incredible performance and responsiveness, and true ultra HD 4K."

7th Generation Intel Core is the newest family of processors for 2 in 1s and laptops. 7th Gen Intel Core extends the benefits of Intel’s industry leading 14nm process technology, delivering even more performance. It also introduces a new media engine that opens up a new world of premium 4K UHD content – for viewing, streaming, creating and sharing. The result is new PCs that have incredible performance and responsiveness, richer visuals with better integrated graphics, more refined and expanded user experiences, longer battery life, and the ability to take full advantage of the immersive internet.
 
And here it comes, this is going to have people up in arms:

This video engine also enforces anti-piracy DRM protections as required by the major studios. Hollywood bosses didn't want to stream 4K ultra high-def content from online clouds without mechanisms in place to thwart casual rippers, and so Intel gave the entertainment giants what they wanted.

"There are hardware-based protection mechanisms to make the studios comfortable with sharing high-quality content to PCs for the first time," said Regis.
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Still saving for my next box revision. Wonder if this un-expected iteration will change AMD's game plan.

Has HardOCP ever done a side by side of the past 5 gen or so Intel chips to show the iterative difference? I would be interested in looking at the comparisons.
 
It will be interesting to see what happens with future gens, now after Intel has started to stray from their strict Tick-Tock schedule and laid off a massive amount of engineers.

Intel seems to be slowing down just as AMD is speeding up again. Unlike some I don't think Zen will impress out of the gate (even if we get the full 40% IPC increase they promise, it will still be 10% behind Sandy Bridge, which is pretty old at this point) but if Intel is slowing down, it might allow AMD to gradually catch up with successive generations.
 
ir0nw0lf said:
And here it comes, this is going to have people up in arms:

This video engine also enforces anti-piracy DRM protections as required by the major studios. Hollywood bosses didn't want to stream 4K ultra high-def content from online clouds without mechanisms in place to thwart casual rippers, and so Intel gave the entertainment giants what they wanted.

"There are hardware-based protection mechanisms to make the studios comfortable with sharing high-quality content to PCs for the first time," said Regis.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

This is concerning. Not because I am a supporter of piracy, but because every time DRM is introduced it just winds up hurting legitimate customers, by limiting their options, and getting in the way of fair use.

The ironic part is it probably won't have any effect on piracy at all. Pirates will either break it, or get their content from other sources, and once they repackage the content and reencode it, it is no longer DRM protected, so it won't stop people from playing it.

Either way, any use of this tech is a long ways off, because if streamers required its use, they'd lock out users of older chips, and people hold on to their computers much longer than they used to. You can't make money in streaming by cutting off access to the majority of your potential streamers, and no one is going to buy a new computer just for Netflix.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
This is concerning. Not because I am a supporter of piracy, but because every time DRM is introduced it just winds up hurting legitimate customers, by limiting their options, and getting in the way of fair use.

The ironic part is it probably won't have any effect on piracy at all. Pirates will either break it, or get their content from other sources, and once they repackage the content and reencode it, it is no longer DRM protected, so it won't stop people from playing it.

Either way, any use of this tech is a long ways off, because if streamers required its use, they'd lock out users of older chips, and people hold on to their computers much longer than they used to. You can't make money in streaming by cutting off access to the majority of your potential streamers, and no one is going to buy a new computer just for Netflix.
Click to expand...

Well, Netflix for example COULD require the newer CPU in order to stream 4k, but allow you 1080p. I could see some paranoid and idiotic streamers (like NBC, or the NFL for example) putting that restriction in place to protect their precious "content".
 
dgingeri said:
In other words, a complete yawnfest.
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Well, yeah. Each individual generation has been a yawn fest for the last 10 years, but add 5% every generation for 5 generations and you are u to almost 30%.

Up until recently I was actually under them impression that my Sandy-Bridge-E was still just about as fast as they come. Sure, newer generations have had IPC improvements, but they've been marginal, and my SandyBridge-E overclocks higher than most newer chips (at 4.8) so I didn't even think there might be a reason to believe newer chips are faster.

While Individual generations gains may be small - however - over a few of them things add up, to the point where I have calculated that a Broadwell-E chip is probably as fast as my SandyBridge-E at 4.8, at amuch lower clock (somewhere between 4.1 and 4.3). They may not hit 4.8 anymore in most cases, but I should certainly get more than 4.3 out of one.

So maybe it is time to upgrade for performance improvements some time soon anyway.

I had been planning on upgrading for other reasons (features, power consumption, motherboard getting old, and having plastic breaking) but performance was not on my list of reasons to upgrade.
 
ThatsAgood1jay said:
Still saving for my next box revision. Wonder if this un-expected iteration will change AMD's game plan.

Has HardOCP ever done a side by side of the past 5 gen or so Intel chips to show the iterative difference? I would be interested in looking at the comparisons.
Click to expand...

Check the gpu forums, the scaling tests are sticky'd there.
 
Kaby Lake for mobile is a huge one.
Kaby Lake (Core i7-7500U) im Test: Skylake auf Steroiden

6500U vs 7500U

- CPU
14-16% faster @ Cinebench 11.5
16% faster @ 3DMark 06 CPU
14-24% faster @ X264
16-17% faster @ TrueCrypt
28% faster @ WinRAR

After 5 minutes of load, i7-7500U can sustain similar clocks to an i7-6600U at 25W mode.

- iGPU / Gaming
31% faster @ 3DMark 11 GPU
39% faster @ 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics
33% faster @ Just Cause 3 1366x768 Medium
39% faster @ Bioshock Infinite 1366x768 High
42% faster @ Battlefield 4 1366x768 High
51% faster @ Star Wars Battlefront 1366x768 Medium
 
Shmee said:
Hey I am all for better performance and battery life!
Click to expand...

Intel keeps bragging about how they are upping performance and using less battery.

Yet when you dive deeper these performance are really only related to a very specific sub market. Yes you might get 2->5x performance gain in video decoding. IPC gains on average compute loads are non existent this release. But if only 2% of your market uses it, then you really aren't benefiting the average customer.

On top of that OEM's are constantly making their batteries smaller. So any increase in run time due to lower power usage gets canceled out by a smaller battery. My wife's battery on her 14nm i3 is ridiculously small.

And the final icing on the cake: $389 for a 2 core 4 thread processor....

Thanks for nothing intel.
 
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DigitalGriffin said:
On top of that OEM's are constantly making their batteries smaller. So any increase in run time due to lower power usage gets canceled out by a smaller battery. My wife's battery on her 14nm i3 is ridiculously small.

And the final icing on the cake: $389 for a 2 core 4 thread processor....

Thanks for nothing intel.
Click to expand...

Yep. People crave thin devices, and the easiest way to make a device thinner is to use all of the power savings you get in a new generation of chip, to shrink the battery and keep the battery life the same.

If you think about it, laptops today perform about the same as they did almost 10 years ago, but MAN have they gotten thinner.

I could defend my home with my old Dell Latitudes. With my current shiny HP folio thing? No way. It would probably shatter if looked at wrong.

If I were buying a laptop for myself, I'd still go with one of the older Dell Latitude E series. They were a little thicker, but had decent screens, perform just as well as the modern machines, and I can replace drives and RAM almost as I see fit. There are even aftermarket things that can go in the optical bay if you -like me - don't use CD's/DVD's anymore.
 
Isn't this the platform now that Intel/Microsoft have made an agreement to stop supporting Windows 7 on and forcing up to Windows 10?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yep. People crave thin devices, and the easiest way to make a device thinner is to use all of the power savings you get in a new generation of chip, to shrink the battery and keep the battery life the same.

If you think about it, laptops today perform about the same as they did almost 10 years ago, but MAN have they gotten thinner.

I could defend my home with my old Dell Latitudes. With my current shiny HP folio thing? No way. It would probably shatter if looked at wrong.

If I were buying a laptop for myself, I'd still go with one of the older Dell Latitude E series. They were a little thicker, but had decent screens, perform just as well as the modern machines, and I can replace drives and RAM almost as I see fit. There are even aftermarket things that can go in the optical bay if you -like me - don't use CD's/DVD's anymore.
Click to expand...

The newer Dell Latitudes are still pretty solid machines. You can swap batteries without a screwdriver. Remove two screws and you can replace RAM, HDDs (still have a 2.5" AND an mSATA or M.2 slot), and change out the wifi card. Plus if you get them on the Dell Outlet you can get "refurbished" brand new, unopened laptops returned by corporate customers for dirt cheap.
 
AthlonXP said:
Isn't this the platform now that Intel/Microsoft have made an agreement to stop supporting Windows 7 on and forcing up to Windows 10?
Click to expand...

Yes and no.

No, Windows 7 won't magically not run Kaby Lake CPUs.

Yes, Microsoft will not feature patch Windows 7 to support any special hardware features of Kaby Lake CPUs. Mainstream support for Windows 7 ended last year. Windows 7 is now on extended support, meaning security updates only, until 2020.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
Intel keeps bragging about how they are upping performance and using less battery.

Yet when you dive deeper these performance are really only related to a very specific sub market. Yes you might get 2->5x performance gain in video decoding. IPC gains on average compute loads are non existent this release. But if only 2% of your market uses it, then you really aren't benefiting the average customer.

On top of that OEM's are constantly making their batteries smaller. So any increase in run time due to lower power usage gets canceled out by a smaller battery. My wife's battery on her 14nm i3 is ridiculously small.

And the final icing on the cake: $389 for a 2 core 4 thread processor....

Thanks for nothing intel.
Click to expand...

On the server side, they've been using the power efficiency gains to add more cores (2 per generation): E5-2690 (Sandybridge) has 8 cores, and E5-2690 v4 (Broadwell) has 14 (although frequency dropped from 2.9 to 2.6).
 
Any word on a desktop part with Iris Pro?
What would make me jump from a Skylake i5 to an Kabylake i7 would be some nifty EDRAM

Skylake introduced enhancements for how it uses EDRAM compared to that one Broadwell model
Sadly no socketed Skylake's with Iris Pro
 
Peter2k said:
Any word on a desktop part with Iris Pro?
What would make me jump from a Skylake i5 to an Kabylake i7 would be some nifty EDRAM

Skylake introduced enhancements for how it uses EDRAM compared to that one Broadwell model
Sadly no socketed Skylake's with Iris Pro
Click to expand...

You have to wait till January for that information.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
And the final icing on the cake: $389 for a 2 core 4 thread processor....

Thanks for nothing intel.
Click to expand...

And yet there are some who post on these forums saying AMD should just give up. It's bad enough now, I can't imagine what minimal gen improvements and the price tags would be like if there was no AMD at all.
 
rat said:
And yet there are some who post on these forums saying AMD should just give up. It's bad enough now, I can't imagine what minimal gen improvements and the price tags would be like if there was no AMD at all.
Click to expand...

What do you think Intel uses its R&D on. Nose picking?

As such there is no AMD and haven't been for a long time in these segments.

Also list prices isn't what OEMs pay.
 
Hmm... This looks pretty interesting actually. The h265 performance looks pretty freaking awesome. Might be finally worth upgrading my plex transcode box from ivybridge to kabylake. It should be able to handle all the 4k transcodes and also I could convert all my h264 movies to h265 and save on storage...
 
Shintai said:
Kaby Lake for mobile is a huge one.
Kaby Lake (Core i7-7500U) im Test: Skylake auf Steroiden

6500U vs 7500U

- CPU
14-16% faster @ Cinebench 11.5
16% faster @ 3DMark 06 CPU
14-24% faster @ X264
16-17% faster @ TrueCrypt
28% faster @ WinRAR

After 5 minutes of load, i7-7500U can sustain similar clocks to an i7-6600U at 25W mode.

- iGPU / Gaming
31% faster @ 3DMark 11 GPU
39% faster @ 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics
33% faster @ Just Cause 3 1366x768 Medium
39% faster @ Bioshock Infinite 1366x768 High
42% faster @ Battlefield 4 1366x768 High
51% faster @ Star Wars Battlefront 1366x768 Medium
Click to expand...

That review certainly makes Kaby Lake look awesome for laptops. Hopefully we'll see some more reviews confirming that.
 
And me here, looking at broadwell-e and also waiting for Zen....
 
For those of us on Haswell or earlier, the choice will be between Skylake and Kaby Lake - especially if they take the same motherboard chipsets.

Minimus Skylake i5K is $430USD on Newegg today (16GB VENGEANCE Red, one of three Z170A motherboards, and a boxed i5-6600K) - everything else is carryover.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
This is concerning. Not because I am a supporter of piracy, but because every time DRM is introduced it just winds up hurting legitimate customers, by limiting their options, and getting in the way of fair use.

The ironic part is it probably won't have any effect on piracy at all. Pirates will either break it, or get their content from other sources, and once they repackage the content and reencode it, it is no longer DRM protected, so it won't stop people from playing it.

Either way, any use of this tech is a long ways off, because if streamers required its use, they'd lock out users of older chips, and people hold on to their computers much longer than they used to. You can't make money in streaming by cutting off access to the majority of your potential streamers, and no one is going to buy a new computer just for Netflix.
Click to expand...

Fair use is ALWAYS dependent on content-ownership - that hasn't changed since film. The reasons for content piracy haven't changed since film, either. Some content owners WILL require its use - simply due to user-targeted narrowcasting - that will also, of course, determine how effective such DRM is. (Doesn't matter what methodology is being used, either - it even applies to Denuvo.)
Nobody - not even content owners - expects DRM to be the ONLY driver - you still have to make quality content for it to be worth protecting in the first place. (Look at the brouhaha over Denuvo and ANNO 2205; Denuvo itself was added to this game as of the 1.4 update; all content - fee AND paid - is behind that wall. Even if you had NO interest in the 1.4 update (which is paid DLC), even if you have interest in the 1.5 update - which is free content - you have to swallow Denuvo along with it (hence the debate).)
 
For laptop, it's always nice to have thinner and lighter, but I hope they will soon have an ultralight or tablet that has 24 hr effective life

ask for desktop, the progress is kind of slow. bargains wise, a dual socket e5-2670 would put the kaby lake down on any extensive multicore bench.
 
Bandalo said:
Translation - 5-10% better performance, 5% better battery life.
Click to expand...
Pretty much, but the launch of Kaby Lake Y and U models are interesting for small laptops and tablets. The fastest 4.5W TDP (not SDP) 2c/4t model has a 3.6GHz turbo speed, and with Speed Shift 2.0, it should feel pretty snappy for such a low power CPU model.
 
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wildpig1234 said:
For laptop, it's always nice to have thinner and lighter, but I hope they will soon have an ultralight or tablet that has 24 hr effective life
Click to expand...

Going to be a long time before an x86 tablet hits 24 hours of battery life.
 
Terpfen said:
Going to be a long time before an x86 tablet hits 24 hours of battery life.
Click to expand...


Well, note how he said "effective" life.

I don't think it's as far off as you think.

24h of effective use Doesn't necessarily mean 24 hours of use.

My cellphone has 24 hours of effective use, in that if I use it without thinking about it, I very rarely run out of power before the end of the day, so I only have to charge it over night.

My current work issued laptop (HP Folio with an i5-3420U) gets me about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through my work day with the standard little battery it came with. I'm not crazy about the laptop in general (I think the screen and keyboard both suck, but I have expensive tastes there, and it seems tough to upgrade should you want to) but I HAVE been very impressed with battery life.

I mean, between work and private use, how many hours do you actually spend on a laptop in a day? I probably use it about 5-6 hours a day at work (don't use it during meetings and such). I don't use laptops at all at home, because I have my desktop, but if I did, it would probably only be another 2 or so) so if I could get 7-8 hours of battery life out of it that would probably be enough to last through the day and only need to charge at night.

Now granted, this is with light use. Not that you'd want to play games on this thing, but if you did, it would probably drain through the battery MUCH more quickly. But I have no desire to ever play a game on a laptop anyway. To me games belong on the desktop and on the desktop only, at a proper desk. I don't have them on any other device or platform, and I don't want them in my livingroom either, even if PC based.

Anyway, we aren't at full 24 hour use yet, but I ust don't think we are as far off as you think. You could probably even do it today if you were willing to put up with the bulk of one of those battery expanders, and use a low power Atom machine.
 
Dawill said:
Hmm... This looks pretty interesting actually. The h265 performance looks pretty freaking awesome. Might be finally worth upgrading my plex transcode box from ivybridge to kabylake. It should be able to handle all the 4k transcodes and also I could convert all my h264 movies to h265 and save on storage...
Click to expand...

I was going to build a dedicated plex box using NAS4Free and jailbreak. However the FreeBSD base doesn't support anything past ivy bridge and getting it to work is "difficult". Support has to be built into the PLEX software as well.

Anything else is a massive powerdrain/hog relatively speaking.
 
Dawill said:
Hmm... This looks pretty interesting actually. The h265 performance looks pretty freaking awesome. Might be finally worth upgrading my plex transcode box from ivybridge to kabylake. It should be able to handle all the 4k transcodes and also I could convert all my h264 movies to h265 and save on storage...
Click to expand...


I'm happy with h264 for now. I'd embrace h265 full force, but in my HTPC setup I've had problems with Intel's VAAPI drivers, so I bought low end Nvidia GT720 GPU's for now. Once a cheap low end version of Nvidias GPU's with h265 support comes out, I'll consider bumping them up, but for now h265 support is only in the mid to high end parts.

When the time comes though, I'm not sure I'd transcode existing ripped files. I'd probably want to go back and reencode from the source material, for the sake of quality.
 
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