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Comment by Meegul | Hacker News Reader

The author of this article says that Kaby Lake is an 'anomaly' when it comes to the tick-tock strategy that Intel has been following. However, this is not the case. Following the rollout of Intel's 14nm lineup, Intel realized that it was no longer feasible to move to a smaller processing node every 2 years. And so tick-tock died.

It is currently not expected that after Kaby Lake or the 14nm node, that Intel will move back to the tick-tock model. Kaby Lake is no anomaly - it's a normal architecture update in the post 14nm world.

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I am all for such updates, especially when they bring new important features. For some reason people always think it's all about clock speed, performance, etc. It isn't. Kaby Lake new features introduce:

Native USB 3.1 Generation 2 (10 Gbit/s) support (personal favorite)

200 Series chipset (Union Point)

Support for 16 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from CPU, 24 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from PCH (LGA 1151)

Support for Thunderbolt 3

Support for Intel Optane Technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake

You forgot HEVC 10-bit hardware decode, VP9 10-bit hardware decode

Does it mean support for h264 Hi10P profile too?

What will be the simd width? Will it support avx512?

It appears to be the same old 256-bit Skylake core.

Thank you.

Skylake Xeons are supposed to support AVX-512 and Kaby Lake was supposed to be the first desktop platform enabling them, so there is hope ;-)

Hopefully AMD's Zen desktops support AVX512, forcing Intel's hand.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10578/amd-zen-microarchitectur...

> The FP side of the core will afford two multiply ports and two ADD ports, which should allow for two joined FMAC operations or one 256-bit AVX per cycle.

Still looking forward to Zen

I bought a Haswell Xeon (e5 1630) just this week for a new workstation build, because it was the only Xeon with high ghz that was available at a reasonable price (ie comparable to i7). E.g. the e3 1280 is a skylake xeon but 'only' supports avx2. Maybe the e7 skylake ones have avx512? I didn't look into those as they were out of my budget anyway :)

This thread might help: https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-isa-extensions...

Be careful about buying into marketing BS. Nothing about the Kaby Lake platform has anything to do with Intel Optane; Optane SSDs are just NVMe SSDs and will work with any PCIe host, and if you think they've added Optane NV-DIMM support to a consumer platform more than a year before such products even exist to be bought by enterprise customers, you're delusional.

Likewise, "Support for Thunderbolt 3" is misleading; Thunderbolt 3 obviously does not require a Kaby Lake processor. Kaby Lake may include a built-in Thunderbolt 3 host controller, but I haven't seen clear confirmation of that. Skylake is also advertised as having Thunderbolt 3 support, but that only means it has PCIe lanes to attach to a Thunderbolt 3 controller.

I agree that it's a slightly odd way of describing the situation, but it is true that this is a _different_ kind of architecture update than what Intel has done for the past few years, which is worth pointing out to readers. For people who are not up to date on Intel's roadmap, this update is distinct from what has happened before, and therefore anomalous.

True, but they really should have taken the care to clarify that this is also suppose to be the new normal. Kind of sloppy otherwise.

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