Intel has officially launched its Kaby Lake CPUs for notebooks, offering 4K video performance thanks to greater CPU and GPU power, as well as improved battery life through efficiency boosts. 4K content can actually be played for up to nine hours on a single charge, with the new Core i7-7500U, since it it utilised at just five percent to play a 4K video.
These 14nm parts represent the 7th generation of Intel's Core line up of CPUs, offering around 12 percent improvement in overall performance and 19 percent improvement in web performance, so browsing the internet should be a much smoother experience on Kaby Lake hardware than it was on previous generations.
Gaming wise, the new chips are said to be pretty capable too. If you're running a laptop with a five year old processor and no dedicated GPU, jumping to Kaby Lake could see performance improvements by up to three times. That's seriously noticeable - and if you need more, you can always add an external GPU through the on board Thunderbolt 3 ports that some laptops will come with.
Unfortunately all of these improvements are constrained to laptops right now. We will need to wait until early 2017 for the first desktop variants to arrive. What will be most interesting then is to see how AMD's Zen holds up against the new generation from Intel.
Will they be competitive in any sector? Here's hoping.
