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  • Black Obsidian - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    As the owner of an Ivy Bridge-based NUC doing HTPC duty, I've been waiting for HEVC Main10 decode support (and HDMI 2.0) to upgrade. Looks like that'll be happening soon.
  • edzieba - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    Are you sure you haven't been waiting for High Profile 10-bit support, not Main Profile? For media playback (BD and it's UHD successor) on an HTPC, High Profile support is the relevant encoding profile needed for playback.
  • Black Obsidian - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    Full hardware support for High Profile would be ideal, but even partial support would be something. My Ivy Bridge NUC does H265 entirely in software, and chokes on 1080p content if there's any significant amount of on-screen movement.
  • nandnandnand - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    All I care about is how Kaby Lake mobile will do vs. Zen mobile APUs.
  • yannigr2 - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    It will have (much) higher IPC compared to Zen, (much) better energy efficiency compared to Zen and completely destroyed by Zen in the graphics section.
  • psychobriggsy - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    1. Unknown as yet, IPC is likely to be in the same ballpark though (finally!) even if KL edges it by a few percent. Clock speeds at various TDPs and real-life battery usage are what matter in the end and these figures are a way off being tested. Maybe even Cannonlake will be the competition, not KL.

    2. Unproven as yet - AMD had to implement a lot of energy saving on 28nm APUs and these will be migrated to 14nm APUs

    3. Zen is a CPU core and doesn't do graphics. The Zen-based APU will likely use Vega level graphics however, and totally destroy the Intel graphics in all aspects.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    vega level would take too much power. something 460 sized would be about as big as a 125 watt APU could take.

    If they solve the bandwidth problem though, it would still be a major advantage over intel.
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    By "Vega level" he means it's based on the same architecture level, not the size & performance of the chip.
  • smilingcrow - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    3. Mobile these days generally means 15W or even less so it's not safe to assume that AMD's inherently better graphics prowess will allow them to compete with Intel at these power levels as it depends a lot on how good their fabrication partner is.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    all massive assumptions, given that intel typically lags behind GPU wise and we have yet to see zen cpus in action.
  • melgross - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    I see nothing different in Zen than we've seen in older, highly touted AMD products, post Intel Netburst, which is to say, over promoted, and under performing.
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    That's because you've seen nothing yet. Don't expect miracles, but a very solid performer is not out of the question.
  • r3loaded - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    "Kaby Lake will be focused on mobile first"

    Expect to see yet another round of disappointingly small and incremental IPC improvements while prices get jacked up on the desktop side of things. We need Zen in the market more than ever.
  • saratoga4 - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    I'm fully expecting Zen to disappoint but really hoping I'm wrong so that there is some competition.
  • retrospooty - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    LOL, same here. Whatever a lesser scale of "cautiously optimistic" is... Deliberately doubtful?
  • extide - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    dangerously optimistic, lol
  • Morawka - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    Supposedly 40% IPS gains put it's IPC right at around Haswell. a 8 core haswell CPU is around $1k (one with overclocking) so if zen really is as good as haswell, then AMD have a real winner on their hands. This at the very least, will force intel to include more cores
  • lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    I believe it's about efficiency, more so than identical/better performance. Haswell ain't no slouch, it's only a tad bit slower than Skylake. If AMD manages a home run in efficiency in addition to a nice Polaris integrated GPU AND competitive pricing, then I'm all in on AMD.
  • Kjella - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    Here's a Skylake die shot:
    https://www.techpowerup.com/img/15-08-18/77a.jpg
    For those of us that use a GPU anyway for gaming we could have had a GPU-less 8-core chip at the size/price of a quad-core. By force-feeding the desktop market with IGPs they took the low end GPU market from AMD/nVidia instead. I hope AMD comes out with an all-CPU desktop oriented processor, if they do that and still can't compete there's really no hope for them.
  • Arnulf - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    HD 530 in i7-6700K works fine for me. I don't play much but it runs things like WoWS smoothly at VSync cap.

    I really loathed the extra fan and power consumption of a discrete GPU and would have gone Bristol Ridge -> Raven Ridge way if AMD actually wanted to take my money ...
  • TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    well guess what? intel makes that 8 core chip for you. So stop complaining that intel doesnt make one.

    Yes, it costs more, but a 8 core CPU is a niche product.
  • patel21 - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    If they can deliver performace equal to an i3 with a solid gpu power, at around 60% of i3's cost. Then I can say, that they're back in GAME
  • melgross - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    Amd's chips are never as good as the claim before they arrive. When are people going to learn that? It's not as though it's unusual.
  • retrospooty - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link

    Exactly... Well not "never" but not in the past decade, so point taken. Anything AMD says pre-release should be taken with a huge grain of salt. None of it means anything until retail units are independently tested. Pre-release performance goals and/or claims mean nothing. Cherry picked engineering samples running cherry picked benchmarks mean nothing.
  • lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    Amen.
  • Cliff34 - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    I was hoping it will have better efficiency but I doubt it given lack of info from the marketing side.
  • III-V - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link

    You should have expected that anyway... mobile's been the focus for over a decade now.
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    "disappointingly small and incremental IPC improvements"

    That's already happening even if they announce improvements (depending on the perspective). This time they announced exactly NO improvements to the CPU core, so don't expect any IPC improvement and simply 100 to 200 MHz more on some models, maybe accompanied by small power savings due to optimizations.
  • extide - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    Yeah I doubt we will see much gains in KL vs SKL as far as IPC or clockspeed goes. This is really more of a refresh but with a new version number slapped on. Kinda like a rebrand in the GPU world, but with some new features (codesc) and stuff. We will see, I guess, when benchmarks come out.
  • yannigr2 - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    @Ian Cutress

    Any indications about Adaptive Sync support?

    I would expect Intel, with those pathetic integrated GPUs, to be happy to support it, especially now that FreeSync(Adaptive Sync) monitors are everywhere.
  • haukionkannel - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    Intel has announced that it will support adaptive sync, but not when...
  • yannigr2 - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    That's why I am asking. If they don;t support it now, I guess next best case scenario will be with Canonlake.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    It's great to see Intel's mobile focus these days. Hopefully this generation will bring a lot more GPU power to the table since AMD and NV look like they're staged for a huge miss on power savings in their latest cards. Maybe Intel can exert some pressure on them at the bottom end to try a little harder at getting reasonable GPUs out the door.
  • melgross - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link

    I'm disappointed that they don't seem to support DisplayPort 1.3, just 1.2.
  • BlueBlazer - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link

    These mobile chips are looking more interesting on every new generation. With the new integrated graphics hardware features, Intel's Kaby Lake on 4.5W (like Intel's Core M series) could be a killer chip.

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