Rumor: Intel’s Kaby Lake gets support for Optane memory

Intel’s Kaby Lake processors, which will follow the Skylake models, will receive support for Intel Optane and 10bit-hevc/vp9 processing, and can display 5k resolutions. In addition, the cores should perform better. At least that is stated in slides published by a Taiwanese site.

How much better the cores of Kaby Lake should perform compared to those of Skylake, is not clear from the slides that Benchlife publishes. This site often releases Intel information early. Those slides also state that Kaby Lake will get extensive overclocking options and that processors with unlocked multipliers will appear, just like with previous generations. The Kaby Lake processors will be compatible not only with the current 100 Series chipsets, but also with upcoming 200 Series chipsets.

New information has also appeared about those chipsets. The 200 Series will receive support for up to 24 PCI-e 3.0 interfaces, up from 20 with the 100 Series. In addition, there will be support for up to 6 SATA 600 interfaces and up to 10 USB 3.0 ports. Kaby Lake and the 200 Series chipset must also be able to handle Intel’s Optane technology. This is a type of phase change memory formerly known as 3D XPoint memory that Intel introduced last summer.

Intel developed this in collaboration with Micron and Optane to combine the speed of working memory with the storage capacity of flash memory. In the first instance, this concerns 128 Gbit chips, which are built around a Cross Point Array Structure, in which up to 128 billion memory cells can be addressed, each good for 1 bit of data. The first Optane generation comes on the market as an SSD.

Kaby Lake would appear in 2016 as a successor to Skylake. According to previous reports, the Kaby Lake processors are again produced at 14nm, making it the third generation on that process. The Cannonlake generation must then be produced at 10nm.