Intel Core i7-7700K

$549 | WWW.INTEL.COM.AU Iteration: the current Intel game. “In a stock versus stock scenario, the Core i77700K does deliver an incremental performance gain over the Core i76700K due to a 300MHz higher boost clock.”

The new Intel Core 7th-gen processor, codenamed Kaby Lake, is a frustrating release for consumer desktop PC enthusiasts. With Intel moving away from its Tick-Tock release sequence and switching to Process, Architecture, Optimization (PAO), the barrage of shrinking manufacturing processes that the market had become accustomed to has slowed. With the chipmaking giant switching to PAO, this slowdown is now acknowledged.

Bucking the trend set by Moore’s Law of doubling transistor count, as shrinking manufacturing processes become ever harder to facilitate, the Kaby Lake release for some will be met by a slight raise of the eyebrow and a soft sigh. For others, it will be intriguing.

The Intel Core 7th-gen processors have been around for a while (at least in the eyes of the tech world) for those watching the mobile CPU space. However, it has taken numerous months for the desktop variant, Kaby Lake-S, to reach the consumer market. It will be longer still for the high-end desktop (HEDT) market, still rocking away with Haswell-E and Broadwell-E on the X99 LGA2011-v3 platform, now a generation behind the consumer -S desktop variant microarchitecture.

For those that are intrigued by the crossover of mobile technologies to the desktop space, the updated handling of 4K HVEC encoding and decoding via a hardwarebased implementation in Kaby Lake versus the hybrid solution found in Skylake will make some smile. This potentially opens the door for 4K Netflix on desktops and other high-res, highbitrate audio-visual services such as Sony’s Ultra, currently only available on Sony’s smart TV range, due to hardware- based DRM solutions. There are also additional VP9 encode and