The reality of microprocessor design is slowly but surely losing pace against Moore's Law - and Intel's new Kaby Lake series of CPUs is a clear example of this. Stuck on the 14nm fabrication process, the latest Core i5s and i7s offer - clock for clock - the exact same performance as the existing Skylake processors you can buy now. So is there any actual point in Intel releasing these chips?
Well, the reality is that factoring out IPC (instructions per clock), Kaby Lake is indeed a step forward compared to Skylake. And it all starts with that all-important 14nm process technology. Intel says that it has refined it significantly, the end result being that all Kaby Lake processors offer a frequency boost over their Skylake predecessors. So, in the case of the Core i5 7600K we're reviewing here, base and turbo clocks receive a significant uplift - run the chip on a Z170 or Z270 board, hit the XMP button in the BIOS and you'll have a processor running at 4.2GHz on all four cores with zero effort required. 'Enhanced Turbo' is part and parcel of XMP memory overclocking on all enthusiast boards these days.
The revised CPU manufacturing process also seems to offer significantly higher overclocking potential. Our Skylake-based Core i5 6600K overclocks nicely enough to 4.5GHz, but the new Kaby Lake chip offers rock-solid stability at 4.8GHz with the possibility of hitting over 5.0GHz with air-cooling. We only had an engineering sample chip to test with a pre-retail BIOS before Christmas, but during the holidays, Asus released a new BIOS said to hit offer a one-button 5.0GHz solution that works with 80 per cent of Kaby Lake processors.
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