Intel today unveiled the new 7th Gen Intel Core processors. The company is framing Kaby Lake PCs as go-to devices for productivity, virtual reality, and 4K gaming and video So far about 100 laptops, 2-in-1s, and tablets with Kaby Lake installed will be available from PC makers by the end of this year.

The actual SKUs that will be launched starting from today consist of three Kaby Lake-Y parts around 4.5W aimed at high-end tablets and 2-in-1 devices and three Kaby Lake-U parts at 15W for notebooks. Both sets of KBL-Y and KBL-U CPUs will feature in mini-PCs as well.

Intel says that its engineering and manufacturing teams have drawn even more out of our 14nm process technology with what the company calls 14nm+. According to Intel, 7th Gen Intel Core delivers up to 12 percent faster productivity performance and up to 19 percent faster web performance over the previous generation from just a year ago.

The graphics power, in terms of EUs or the microarchitecture, hasn’t changed but the fixed function hardware has some upgrades for an updated version of Gen 9 graphics aimed at the upcoming era of 4K support.

Kaby Lake is still an Intel Gen9 GPU - the core GPU architecture has not changed – but Intel has revised the video processing blocks to add urther functionality and improve their performance for Kaby Lake.

The major feature change in the Kaby Lake-U/Y media engine is the availability of full hardware acceleration for encode and decode of 4K HEVC Main10 profile videos.

Kaby Lake has also implemented full fixed function 8-bit encode and 8/10-bit decode support for Google’s VP9 codec.

The Video Quality Engine also receives some tweaks for HDR and Wide Color Gamut (Rec.2020) support. Skylake's VQE brought in RAW image processing support with a 16-bit image pipeline for selected filters. Intel says that the HDR capabilities involve usage of both the VQE and the EUs in the GPU.

Intel claims that Kaby Lake-U/Y can handle up to eight 4Kp30 AVC and HEVC decodes simultaneously. HEVC decode support is rated at 4Kp60 up to 120 Mbps. With Kaby Lake-U/Y's process improvements, even the 4.5W TDP Y-series processors can handle real-time HEVC 4Kp30 encode.

Moving on, like the GPU core itself, Kaby Lake-U/Y's display pipeline is the same as that of Skylake. This means the iGPU can support up to three simultaneous displays.

Kaby Lake also has an updated Speed Shift package, to accelerate the work already done with Skylake in boosting the performance of the CPU quicker to save power. Intel call it a refinement in the mechanism of handing frequency control back from the OS to the CPU.

The KBL-Y series is dropping both the m5 and my naming scheme from its segment. We will see m3 still, but this will now be paired with i5 and i7.

Intel is starting launching the small die, low power Y & U series processors, and then will move further up the stack later on. So all 6 SKUs launching today - 3 at 4.5W and 3 at 15W - are based on the same 2+2 die. This means 2 CPU cores paired with a GT2 iGPU.

Here are the new KBL-Y 4.5W processors:

The parts above all use a dual core, GT2 die with the low TDP numbers generated from the very low base frequency. Intel's power management system allows for several states that dictate peak turbo frequency, frequency based on power draw, frequency based on skin temperature and thermal throttling.

Kaby Lake-Y is similar to previous Y processors in that they will command a high premium. Even the base m3 processor runs a tray (1000 unit) listed price of $281, and 2-in-1s/notebooks with the similar Skylake parts over the past year have been running at the $600-$700 on the super low end.

The top end Core i7-7Y75 has the highest frequency of any Kaby Lake part in its turbo, at 3.6 GHz, and this is impressive for a 4.5W CPU.

It’s worth noting that for all these Y parts, no exact figures for the graphics were provided. There is also still no support for DDR4.

Next is the trio of Kaby Lake-U parts, with a nominal rated TDP of 15W.

The specifications of these three parts look similar to the Y series - dual core with hyperthreading, similar single core frequencies and similar pricing. What drives the TDP up is the base frequency, despite the use of Speed Shift technology (on Windows 10).

The Core i3, as with other i3 parts in generations gone by, has no Turbo Boost. This means that all cores and threads will run at a fixed frequency until idle or thermal throttling kicks in. The Core i5 and Core i7, while still dual core with hyperthreading, have Turbo Boost with an increase in both range and base frequency as we go up the chain.

Intel expects OEMs to start shipping 7th Gen systems to end users by beginning of September. Strong ramp of 7th Gen mobile systems and a variety of mobile systems will be in market in time for the holiday shopping season.