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Here’s a peek at how much extra performance Intel's Kaby Lake delivers

By Koh Wanzi - on 7 Oct 2016, 3:47pm

Here’s a peek at how much extra performance Intel's Kaby Lake delivers

Image Source: PC World

Laptops with Intel’s seventh-generation Kaby Lake processors are just beginning to trickle out into the wild. That said, the biggest question now is probably just how much of an improvement Kaby Lake offers over the older Skylake processors. Kaby Lake is the first product line from Intel to officially debut on its new process-architecture-optimization model (the optimization stage to be exact), so it’s interesting to see what sort of enhancements it brings to the table.

To that end, PC World actually compared three Dell XPS laptops, each using successive generations of chips – Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake – to get some idea of the relative performance differences.

In sum, Kaby Lake does deliver tangible performance improvements in terms of both compute and graphics workloads.

For starters, the Core i5-7200U (2.5GHz, 3MB cache) is around 10 per cent faster than the Core i5-6200U (2.3GHz, 3MB cache). Battery life is also around 14 per cent better in hardware-accelerated video workloads, excepting the 10-bit HEVC 4K workloads that Skylake doesn’t have dedicated hardware support for. In the latter case, battery life is a whopping 3.5 times better.

The improvement is so stark because the dedicated video block for 10-bit HEVC 4K decode on the graphics engine means there's no need for the CPU cores to ramp up to process the decode tasks as they do in Skylake, thus translating into lower power consumption.

This is similar to the 10 to 15 per cent improvement that AMD is claiming Bristol Ridge offers over Carrizo, so there’s not much change in how the both companies are positioned relative to each other.

That said, Intel did also up the clock speed on Kaby Lake chips by about 10 per cent, so the concomitant performance boost is somewhat expected. Instead, it is the improved battery consumption that is most impressive, mainly thanks to the dedicated video engine for 10-bit HEVC 4K playback and more refined 14nm+ process.

Source: PC World

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