With Skylake on the market it is time to look forward to see what Intel has in store for us in the near future. What we know so far is that the US chip maker will release a new chip generation called Kaby Lake sometime next year. Kaby Lake will be a refresh of the current Skylake generation but it will be built on 10 nm process technology. And after this we will get Cannonlake – a new chip generation on 10 nm that is expected to come with various exciting new technologies.
Unfortunately it appears that Intel will not put enough effort in Cannonlake as it has been doing lately – this CPU generation will not come with more than 8 processing cores with only the top models (read Cannonlake-E) having 8 cores inside. All other chips of this generation will have 2-6 cores with mainstream Cannonlake chips having just 4 of them.
According to unofficial information from Intel, the company will divide Cannonlake in three segments – server chips with the largest number of cores, server chips with several cores and server chips with just a few Cannonlake cores (perhaps just two). As to PCs – most Cannonlake desktop processors will have four cores with certain models having just 2 cores inside.
This reminds us much of the current situation – Intel has been having two-core processors in its budget-oriented processors for quite some time now, then we have mainstream chips with four cores and high-end processors with 6-8 cores. Moreover each chip generation has been bringing just incremental performance improvements and this trend seems to be here to stay.
What’s even worse is that high-end chips with more cores get released later than mainstream processors, which means that we will likely get Cannonlake-E after the desktop Cannonlake generation. Given that Cannonlake is scheduled for year 2017, we will get the 8-core Cannonlake chips only sometime in year 2018. So as you can see don’t get too excited with Intel’s current CPU roadmap.
Source: Wccftech.com