Intel to Discontinue Nearly All Desktop Kaby Lake CPUs

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• bhtooefr - Sunday, October 13, 2019 - link

  AFAIK, the answer basically boils down to Windows 7.
  
  Windows 7 won't run on anything newer than Skylake (but it will run on a 200-series platform even with a Skylake processor). So, you need Skylakes for that.
  
  And, if you're still producing 200-series platforms, have Kaby Lakes around for those using Win10 on those platforms, so only the CPU has to be different between Win7 and Win10 deployments?

• RavenRampkin - Sunday, October 13, 2019 - link

  iirc AMD is still making FXes too, if I'm not mistaken

• jgraham11 - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

  Remember when Intel released another Quad Core as their mainstream high-end processor, then AMD came out with Ryzen, a processor that had double the cores and it forced them to announce 8th Gen only 3 months after starting to sell this generation... Competition is a good thing otherwise we would still be stuck at 4 hyper-threaded cores for the high-end.

• eek2121 - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

  This has nothing to do with competition. This is about freeing up node space for future 14nm parts, which in turn allows them to ramp up 10nm.

• bananaforscale - Saturday, October 12, 2019 - link

  And 10nm has nothing to do with competition? :P

• PeachNCream - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

  It is interesting to watch Intel scramble to respond to AMD, but I don't think killing off desktop Kaby Lake is a result of any specific AMD activities. Desktop sales are sluggish at best to begin with. A few workstations in limited roles in businesses are being purchased and there are the low-volume gaming boxes out there, but the reality is that Joe Average buys a laptop (or just uses a mobile phone) and companies and governments issue out bland Probooks and Latitudes for most of their workforce.

• Qasar - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

  maybe where you are PeachNCream, but no one i know has any interest in a notebook, they have, and keep using desktops. i dont think, Joe average as you put it buys laptops as much as you say, but that could also be just the region, area or city too.

• PeachNCream - Friday, October 11, 2019 - link

  I don't put a great deal of faith in hardware sales surveys, but what I have seen published over the last decade or so seems to indicate an overall, long-running trend away from desktop computers. They are a shrinking market. There's nothing wrong with them as they have their uses and benefits, but I am going to stick to it that new purchases have been leaning toward more portable and mobile computing solutions.

• Qasar - Friday, October 11, 2019 - link

  still, maybe where you are, and " what I have seen published over the last decade or so seems to indicate " well, for here, that seems to be the opposite :-) i guess... this is one of those, agree to disagree, things :-)

• Diji1 - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link

  The reason Intel was not that concerned about Ryzen is that desktop market is relatively low margin compared to mobile and server.
  
  They recently shit themselves when it became apparent that Ryzen is a threat to their share of the server market.