Skylake processors are old news. At its earning call today, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich confirmed the company is now shipping its seventh generation processor, Kaby Lake.
As Anandtech points out, ‘shipping’ means that Kaby Lake is headed to supply chain partners for companies like Apple and HP. To that, we can expect to see it in computers soon, hopefully by the end of the year.
The interesting thing is that Kaby Lake processors are long overdue. Intel struggled with Moore’s Law in switching from a 22nm process to a 14nm one to shrink the chipset’s architecture, and that caused it to move away from its tick-tock release cycle.
Just four months ago, Intel admitted that it was struggling with making significant performance gains with the 14nm process. ‘Cannonlake’ processors, which will be the first Intel chipsets to use the 10nm process, are set to start production next year.
Will Intel be inside the new MacBook Pro?
Kaby Lake processors aren’t smaller than Skylake units, but do have better performance. In changing its development process, Intel also made commitments to ship significantly better products each time around:
We expect to lengthen the amount of time we will utilize our 14nm and our next generation 10nm process technologies, further optimizing our products and process technologies while meeting the yearly market cadence for product introductions.
What we don’t know is when Kaby Lake processors began shipping. As we lie in wait for a new MacBook Pro, we’re hoping the delay was caused in part to Intel and it’s new development cycle.
Sadly, there’s not much news coming out of Apple’s supply chain as MacBooks are concerned, so we have nothing to point to.
Many assumed Apple would simply include a Skylake processor in the next MacBook Pro and iterate with a Kaby Lake upgrade. That thinking was due to Intel; it didn’t commit to when Kaby Lake would ship, only that it was delayed.
So we’ve got new hope that the next MacBook Pro will be slim like the MacBook, insanely powerful thanks to Kaby Lake and arrive this Fall.
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