Intel has officially announced its next generation of advanced processors that it's calling Kaby Lake.

The Intel 7th gen Kaby Lake processors will go into production in the next few months and begin to ship before the end of the year. They will appear alongside new entry-level 7th gen Apollo Lake processors.

The Intel 7th gen Kaby Lake processors are going to pack in some serious threading power. But they won't follow Intel's usual Tick-Tock format. This usually means one year sees a drop in chip size, for tick, and another year sees a new microarchitecture, for tock.

This year the Kaby Lake processors will remain at the 14-nanometre footprint but will have a more "optimised" microarchitecture.

The Apollo Lake chips will be a more affordable version of the current 6th gen Skylake chips. They should be able to handle 4K video and make USB-C in laptops and tablets more affordable as well as supporting Thunderbolt 3 and IR cameras.

Intel has also announced a boosted Broadwell-E Extreme Edition chip in its i7-6950X which will pack 10-cores, 20-threads, Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0, 4-channel memory support, 25MB Smart Cache and overclocking thanks to being fully unlocked. VR and 4K gaming, your time is at hand.

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