Editor's note: In fact, on August 21, Beijing time, Intel released four products of the eighth generation Core family's Kaby Lake Refresh architecture online, and on August 22, this event was Intel's only offline conference for these four products in the world, which was located in Block D of Beijing World Trade Center.

At the end of August 2016, Intel brought us the U-series and Y-series processors of the seventh generation of Core family Kaby Lake. From the current perspective, the toothpaste of Kaby Lake is not very crowded. One year later today, we saw Kaby Lake Refresh. Intel only brought us four products this time, all of which are low-voltage U series, but this time it is obviously full of sincerity, Because it has 40% performance improvement compared with the previous generation.

According to Intel's strategy this time, the eighth generation Core will take three steps.

Part I: 14nm+Kaby Lake Refresh has been launched

Part II: 14nm++Coffee Lake is expected to be launched this autumn

Part III: 10nm Cannon Lake is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2018

As the first step of the three steps, Of course, Kaby Lake Refresh has a great responsibility. Although Kaby Lake Refresh uses the same 14nm+process as Kaby Lake, it has nothing to do with the subsequent 10nm Cannon Lake, but it has the aura of "the eighth generation of Core" after all, so if Kaby Lake Refresh performs poorly and has a bad reputation, the subsequent products of the eighth generation of Core family will also be affected to a certain extent. The reason is so simple that we all understand it, and Intel also understands it. It is obvious that Intel attaches great importance to the eighth generation of Core family products. At one time, the products with three architectures are placed in the eighth generation of Core family, which is unprecedented. Moreover, with Intel's habit, the 10nm Canon Lake can be placed in the ninth generation of Core, For the eighth generation, it is enough to have a 14nm++Coffee Lake. This time, Intel's approach is unusual. I think This is a signal from Intel to the PC market: Intel has always been the leader of PC.

In fact, every year when the new generation of Core is released, Intel will officially give a performance improvement. Last year's seventh generation was 15%. As users who know Intel, they will not care too much about this figure. We prefer to believe in the actual evaluation and scoring results of various media after getting the machine, but before looking at the evaluation, Let's first look at the improvement of Kaby Lake Refresh in hardware parameters.

In terms of parameters, the Kaby Lake Refresh this time is very violent. These four products are all low voltage U series, which can be said to be some of the bottom performance parts of Intel's product line, because they are mainly aimed at thin and light notebooks and PC flat panel products, but this time the four processors all use a 4-core 8-thread structure, which is enough to excite everyone, This is the first time in history that a 4-core processor is placed on the U series This means that the thin and light notebook we buy in the future can also have strong enough performance, instead of the dual core i7 and dual core i5 for thousands of years, and the effect will be significantly improved in daily multitasking and office applications.

In addition to the number of cores, let's look at others. Compared with the previous generation, although the number of cores and threads has doubled, the basic frequency has also decreased. Fortunately, the basic frequency has not halved, but the number of cores and threads has doubled, which is enough to make up for. We should also note that, Kaby Lake Refresh's single core maximum Remax frequency is higher than that of the previous generation. Under these conditions, TDP remains unchanged, which is a great surprise. In addition, for the third level cache, which is very important for games, Kaby Lake Refresh also doubles directly. Even if Kaby Lake Refresh did not make a contribution to the third level cache, it is reasonable, because its positioning is not a game based product, but this time Intel has piled up material for it.

Through the simplest parameter comparison, now recall the official sentence of Intel“ 40% performance improvement over the previous generation ”, still quite confident. In fact, Intel's 40% performance improvement is mainly about the multitasking performance of Kaby Lake Refresh, not 40% in all aspects. Of course, it is more than 40% in some aspects.

The following performance description of the eighth generation Core comes from the official Intel

Compared with the previous generation, the performance is improved by up to 40%.

Compared with the old computer five years ago, the performance has been improved twice.

The computer will be able to play up to 10 hours of 4K ultra-high definition local video with only one charge.

When editing photos or creating slides, the eighth generation of Core can be 48% faster than the seventh generation of Core.

The speed of editing video clips can be 14.7 times faster than that of the product five years ago. The video rendered by an old computer five years ago took 45 minutes, but now it takes only three minutes to complete.

When the seventh generation of Core was released last year, Intel emphasized 4K playback, graphics processing, and power consumption. The eighth generation of Core returned to the right path, violently improving performance, and it was just a small change of Kaby Lake Refresh. Although Intel only brought 14nm+Kaby Lake Refresh this time, many users still haven't seen the desktop products and high-performance mobile HQ series they expect, but fortunately, Kaby Lake Refresh has made a good start, which makes us look forward to the next Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake.