Kaby Lake Intel Core processor: 7th- and 8th-gen CPU news

Before the release of Coffee Lake back in October 2017, Kaby Lake was the extremely successful followup to Intel’s Skylake processors. Kaby Lake is notable because it was behind a wide range of the best mainstream laptops and PCs of 2017, including the 2017 Dell XPS 13 and the MacBook Pro. Kaby Lake, by all measures, knocked it out of the park.

Unfortunately, for anyone who’s a fan of Moore’s Law, this has been an extremely confusing and frustrating generation – even for the best processors. This is because Intel abandoned its traditional ‘tick-tock’ generational model – where they would shrink processor tech every other year – and released the 7th and 8th generation Kaby Lake CPUs as the third and fourth releases using Intel’s 14nm process respectively.

Intel then launched Kaby Lake Refresh – a new line of 8th generation Kaby Lake CPUs that focused on laptops.

(Most recently, Intel brought hyperthreading power to its i3 line of Core series processors for laptops.)

Kaby Lake was also subject to the devastating Spectre and Meltdown exploits, but Intel says a fix is on the way.

If all of this sounds confusing, don’t worry, we’ve taken the time to write up everything you need to know about Intel Kaby Lake – from price to availability to the range of processors available.