In their latest news release, Intel has announced the discontinuation of the 7th Generation CPU lineup or Kaby Lake processors. The Kaby Lake lineup launched in 2017 and was the last of Intel's lineup to offer four cores on the flagship mainstream parts until AMD disrupted the entire mainstream landscape with their high core count Ryzen processors.

Intel EOL's The Entire 7th Gen Kaby Lake Lineup - Farewell To The Era of Quad-Core Flagships

The Intel Kaby Lake lineup is said to have its last shipment on 9th October 2020 which means that they won't be available on any retail channel after that. The Kaby Lake lineup was introduced early 2017 and was the last family to feature a quad-core SKU, the Core i7-7700K, as the flagship main-stream offering. That was until AMD launched their Ryzen processors, offering more cores & much higher multi-tasking performance on their own mainstream platform, crushing out the competition on various fronts.

Since then, Intel has moved to higher core count variants of their own on the mainstream front, offering up to 8 cores and 16 threads. The Kaby Lake family was also the 3rd lineup to make use of an advanced 14nm process node which started off with the Broadwell lineup. The architecture for Kaby Lake processors was kept the same as Skylake that came before it and the same architecture is retained across Intel's desktop lineup to date. Intel still faces tough competition from AMD with the release of their competitor's Ryzen 3000 CPUs which will be offering up to 16 cores and 32 threads on the mainstream platform while Intel will only have half the number of cores until 2020.

In 2020, Intel will launch its 6th 14nm offering and the 5th Skylake (revision) family known as Comet Lake will would offer 10 cores and 20 threads while it competes with AMD's 7nm+ line of processors based on the Zen 3 architecture. It is only until 2022 when we can expect the end to the 14nm revisions and a proper post-Skylake architecture to be deployed in Intel's desktop family of mainstream processors. Following is the list of all 14nm Kaby Lake processors which will hit EOL on 9th October 2020:

Core i7-7700KCore i7-7700Core i7-7700TCore i5-7600KCore i5-7600Core i5-7600TCore i5-7500Core i5-7500TCore i5-7400Core i5-7400TCore i3-7350KCore i3-7320Core i3-7300Core i3-7300TCore i3-7100Core i3-7100TPentium G4620Pentium G4600Pentium G4560Pentium G4560TCeleron G3950Celeron G3930

In other news, Intel has also stated that updating your existing X299 motherboard firmware to support the upcoming 10th Gen X-series will remove support of Kaby Lake-X processors. The Kaby Lake-X series which are also part of the 7th Gen HEDT family were released as the Core i7-7740X and the Core i5-7640X, both of which were also quad-core variants.

The processors were EOL'd back in 2018 but those who can still buy them online will have to be aware that updating your motherboards BIOS will definitely kill support for such processors. The new X299 boards definitely won't offer any support for the Kaby Lake-X processors so yeah, we have to bid farewell to the era of quad-cores as flagships and HEDT CPUs.

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#fff;border-top:0;border-right:0;background:transparent;-ms-transform:rotate(-45deg);-webkit-transform:rotate(-45deg);transform:rotate(-45deg);box-shadow:-1px 1px 1px #555}.dem__radio_label .dem__spot:after{width:6px;height:6px;border-radius:50%;top:50%;left:50%;background:#fff;-ms-transform:translate(-50%,-50%);-webkit-transform:translate(-50%,-50%);transform:translate(-50%,-50%);box-shadow:0 0 0 1px #666,inset -1px -1px 1px #ccc}.dem__checkbox_label:hover .dem__spot::after,.dem__radio_label:hover .dem__spot::after{opacity:.4}.dem__checkbox:checked+.dem__spot,.dem__radio:checked+.dem__spot{border-color:#999}.dem__checkbox:checked+.dem__spot:after,.dem__radio:checked+.dem__spot:after{opacity:1}.dem__checkbox:disabled+.dem__spot,.dem__radio:disabled+.dem__spot{opacity:.5}.dem__checkbox:not(:checked):disabled+.dem__spot:after,.dem__radio:not(:checked):disabled+.dem__spot:after{opacity:0}input[type="submit"].dem-button,a.dem-button,.dem-button{font-weight:700;color:#fff;padding:10px 30px;border-radius:3px;background:#eb0254;transition:background .2s}input[type="submit"].dem-button:hover,a.dem-button:hover,.dem-button:hover{background:#eb0254}input[type="submit"].dem-button:active,a.dem-button:active,.dem-button:active{background:#21935a;box-shadow:0 3px #21935a inset}a.dem-button:visited{color:#fff}Do you miss quad core flagship CPUs? No NO NOO

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