Kaby Lake is Intel’s Apology for Skylake

Some believe that Intel's new Kaby Lake processors are not a significant upgrade. Don't believe it. Kaby Lake is nothing less than an apology, and a do-over, for Intel's woefully bug-ridden Skylake processors. It's a family of chips that Intel never intended to make.

The problems with Skylake are well-documented. But to reiterate what I've told you so far---who knows, you may have missed it---Skylake was so buggy and so unreliable that it ruined the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 launch, and triggered a rift in the Intel/Microsoft relationship that extended in dramatic fashion to Microsoft refusing to fully support Skylake-based PCs on Windows 7/8.1.

As you may know, Microsoft has since stepped back from that latter cliff, and will now fully support Skylake on both Windows 7 and 8.1. But it's clear to me that it was only able to do so because Intel committed to fixing the problems with Skylake on those platforms; a highly-placed Microsoft official told me previously that the firm would need to stop Windows 10 development in order to get Windows 7/8.1 working properly on these incredibly unreliable chips.

Don't trust my sources? That's fine. The real proof in the Skylake drama is that Intel never intended to originally ship Kaby Lake. Skylake, the firm's 6th generation Core chipset architecture, was originally to be followed by a major new chipset release called Cannonlake. But Intel was forced to slow down that forward push---Cannonlake will use a new 10nm process, compared to the 14nm process used by Skylake and now Kaby Lake---and wedge in a new Skylake revision called Kaby Lake.

Intel revealed its failures back in March, when it noted that it would no longer be able to hold to its "tick-tock" development cycle. Skylake was a "tock"---i.e. a minor update---meaning that the next release should be a major update. And it would have been, originally. But Kaby Lake is another "tock." So it's tick-tock-tock now, at least for this generation.

That seems to support the contention from CNET, and others, that Kaby Lake is "not a significant upgrade." But such an assessment is only true if you are comparing things like raw performance or power management efficiency. Unlike Skylake, Kaby Lake will (hopefully) just work. And that alone makes it a very important release.

So maybe Kaby Lake won't make your computer much faster. Who cares? Your computer is already fast enough. What Kaby Lake will do is make your computer a lot more reliable. And that, as they say, is priceless.

Microsoft knows this. And while the "delay" on next-generation Surface hardware is really about aligning these products with the natural consumer electronics release cycle, it's fair to say that Microsoft is not super-interested in being first out of the gate with any new Intel chipset again. As it was last year with the Skylake-based Surface Book and Surface Pro 4.

It's also notable, I think, that Apple almost completely skipped the Skylake generation of ...