Intel may be gearing up to take on AMD Ryzen chips with new 7th gen Core i7 and i5 processors. However, there seems to be no significant improvement over the previous Intel chips already released.
AMD Ryzen chips are expected to be launched around early March and fans are already excited to grab their new processors. The company has already demonstrated what their new chips can do along with the upcoming Vega 11 and Vega 10 GPUs that will also take on NVIDIA's GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards.
Intel may be launching a Core i7-7740K Kaby Lake processor with a Turbo frequency of 4.6GHz, according to French tech site Canard PC as cited by Extreme Tech. There is also an Intel Core i5-7640K with a base clock of 4GHz which is not that large of a jump from their current offerings.
AMD Ryzen's threat to Intel may have pushed the latter to speed up the development of faster processors. However, Intel would need to prove that their new products are indeed better not only in terms of frequencies.
Another possible strategy for Intel is to drop the prices on their current offerings. This would benefit consumers overall as there will be more affordable choices for those who want to build or upgrade their rigs.
PC users who are still on Windows 7 may want to upgrade now as AMD confirmed to PC World that they will not be releasing drivers for the outdated OS when Ryzen launches. Microsoft's offer for a free Windows 10 upgrade has passed and customers will have to buy a new legit copy of the updated operating system.
"To achieve the highest confidence in the performance of our AMD Ryzen desktop processors (formerly code-named 'Summit Ridge'), AMD validated them across two different OS generations, Windows 7 and 10," said AMD. "However, only support and drivers for Windows 10 will be provided in AMD Ryzen desktop processor production parts."
AMD Ryzen chips are expected to be released soon. Intel is still silent about their future product offerings and if they will do something to compete with AMD.
Learn more about the new Intel processor below: