Rumor: Intel and AMD to present Kaby Lake and Zen in January 2017

Intel is said to be planning to introduce the new generation of processors, codenamed Kaby Lake, in early 2017 at the CES electronics show. Around the same time, AMD is set to unveil the processors based on its new Zen architecture.

At least that’s what Digitimes writes based on its sources at Taiwanese tech companies. With rumors about Intel and AMD, Digitimes is often right. The site speaks of a postponement because analysts had expected the introduction at the end of 2016, but officially AMD and Intel have not mentioned an introduction date.

In addition, an official launch at CES in Las Vegas in early January 2017 will not prevent the earlier availability of systems with the new processors. That was not the case, for example, with Intel’s releases of Sandy Bridge and Broadwell.

AMD itself announced at the end of last year that the first Zen processors would appear at the end of 2016 at the earliest. Intel’s roadmaps listed the first Core Y and U processors for Kaby Lake-generation laptops for release in mid-Q3 2016, but systems with those chips could still be available in late 2016.

Zen should represent a major leap forward for AMD in terms of its processors, especially thanks to a better IPC, or instructions per cycle. Kaby Lake is expected to be a modest update to Intel processors. The generation is the third step of Intel’s process architecture optimization strategy. Like Broadwell and Skylake, the chips are produced at 14nm, but contain some optimizations compared to those generations.