Hacker News Reader

Comment by neverminder | Hacker News Reader

I am all for such updates, especially when they bring new important features. For some reason people always think it's all about clock speed, performance, etc. It isn't. Kaby Lake new features introduce:

Native USB 3.1 Generation 2 (10 Gbit/s) support (personal favorite)

200 Series chipset (Union Point)

Support for 16 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from CPU, 24 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from PCH (LGA 1151)

Support for Thunderbolt 3

Support for Intel Optane Technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake

View on HN

Be careful about buying into marketing BS. Nothing about the Kaby Lake platform has anything to do with Intel Optane; Optane SSDs are just NVMe SSDs and will work with any PCIe host, and if you think they've added Optane NV-DIMM support to a consumer platform more than a year before such products even exist to be bought by enterprise customers, you're delusional.

Likewise, "Support for Thunderbolt 3" is misleading; Thunderbolt 3 obviously does not require a Kaby Lake processor. Kaby Lake may include a built-in Thunderbolt 3 host controller, but I haven't seen clear confirmation of that. Skylake is also advertised as having Thunderbolt 3 support, but that only means it has PCIe lanes to attach to a Thunderbolt 3 controller.

You forgot HEVC 10-bit hardware decode, VP9 10-bit hardware decode

Does it mean support for h264 Hi10P profile too?

What will be the simd width? Will it support avx512?

It appears to be the same old 256-bit Skylake core.

Thank you.

Skylake Xeons are supposed to support AVX-512 and Kaby Lake was supposed to be the first desktop platform enabling them, so there is hope ;-)

Hopefully AMD's Zen desktops support AVX512, forcing Intel's hand.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10578/amd-zen-microarchitectur...

> The FP side of the core will afford two multiply ports and two ADD ports, which should allow for two joined FMAC operations or one 256-bit AVX per cycle.

Still looking forward to Zen

I bought a Haswell Xeon (e5 1630) just this week for a new workstation build, because it was the only Xeon with high ghz that was available at a reasonable price (ie comparable to i7). E.g. the e3 1280 is a skylake xeon but 'only' supports avx2. Maybe the e7 skylake ones have avx512? I didn't look into those as they were out of my budget anyway :)

This thread might help: https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-isa-extensions...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com