AMD has practically confirmed that the Zen-based Ryzen R7, R5, and R3 CPUs (codenamed SR7, SR5 and SR3) will be released starting March 2 or right after their GDC 2017 intro so naturally Intel has to follow suit with its Kaby Lake bets. And indeed fresh Core i7 and i5 chips on the platform are coming out soon boasting of the 14-nanometer FinFET process, a new report said.
Kaby Lake and 14nm processors will serve as Intel's direct answer to the rising challenge that the AMD Ryzen chips are proving to be, according to WCCFTech. They will be faster and energy-efficient at the same time with hyper-threading options available, and the latter is the obvious counterpart to the Summit Ridge processors' overclocking feature.
The same report did not mention when exactly are Kaby Lake-X Core i7-7740K and Core i5-7640K coming out but the other juicy details have been provided.
The i5-7640K, for instance, is the first on its class to be designed for the Intel HEDT platform and is likely to go against the 6-core/12-thread Ryzen chips. It belongs to the 14nm chip family and packs a base clock of 4.0GHz. The chip is nearly of the same level as that of the Core i7 Kaby Lake-X with 6MB of L3 cache and TDP rating of 112W.
But what likely to be the major draw of this Kaby Lake mid-ranger is the pricing, which WCCFTech said should be close to that of the Ryzen R5 or between $250 and $350.
Now the Kaby Lake-X flagship bet is no doubt the i7-7740K, which the same report dubbed as the fastest quad-core processor when unboxed. The chip will take place of the Core i7-7700K so the specifications have been bumped up - 8MB of L3 cache, 112W of TDP rating and base speed of 4.3GHz that can be boosted to 4.5GHz, essentially confirming that the chip is optimized for hyper-thread.
As for the pricing, the same report speculated that Intel intends to intro the i7-7740K bearing the same tag of the i7-7700K when it first rolled out. Then the latter will be discounted and the ploy will serve as the direct challenge to Ryzen's flagship R7 CPUs that AMD will make available in 8-core/16-thread variant.
It remains to be seen how the Intel Kaby Lake-X Core i7-7740K will stack up against the AMD Ryzen R7 in terms of pricing as the series is expected to cost only a high of $600, which is still relatively cheaper when compared to the usual sticker for flagship Intel Core i7 CPUs that can go beyond the $1000 mark during initial deployments.