Zen vs Kaby Lake - 14nm showdown - are they worth the wait?

S0L0

Honorable
May 18, 2012
105
0
10,680
If Kaby Lake uses 1151 socket than Skylake now seems to make sense for an upgrade next year, if not it may just be worth waiting to see what AMD brings to the table.
 

"Are they worth the wait" - depends on what hardware your using now and if it meets your current needs.
 
Both are about a year away, so you're going to have to ask yourself if what you currently have is good enough to keep for another year. Kaby Lake is simply a refresh of Skylake, so I wouldn't expect any major performance increases there, probably some slightly boosted stock clockspeeds and some chipset improvements with newer motherboards perhaps.

As for Zen, we don't know much about it and we'll have no idea how it performs until its actually out. It could be a big improvement that actually makes AMD competitive with Intel again, or it could be another Bulldozer style faceplant that isn't much of an improvement over its predecessor outside of certain specific situations.
 


maybe 8 core kaby lake? It seems like kaby lake is Intel's response to Zen since they normally don't do refreshes, so it must have them worried. Even if Kaby Lake performs better which it probably will, Zen is very likely going to be better bang for your buck in the low-mid-end which will account for more of the market share than high-end enthusiast i7 & i5 K series.

 


Kaby Lake is happening due to Intel having problems with their 10nm process, leading to Cannonlake getting delayed to 2017. It's the same reason why there was a Haswell refresh in 2014, they were having problems with 14nm leading to Broadwell getting delayed and ultimately scrapped for desktops. It's unlikely we're going to see high core count chips for Kaby Lake, I don't see it happening unless Intel has some inside information on what AMD is doing with Zen that has them worried.
 


It's not unlikely, they will come in HEDT form. You will find Skylake-E processors out at about this time and I suspect these will outperform Zen but of course the price will be higher. Intel already has what it needs to match/defeat Zen, they just might need to drop their prices a little to compete.

All in all I believe that while this increase in performance from AMD will be substantial in comparison to their old tech it won't make much of an impact on Intel's already strong lineup.