Kaby Lake is Intel's codename for its seventh generation Core microprocessor family announced on August 30, 2016. Like the preceding Skylake, Kaby Lake is produced using a 14 nanometer manufacturing process technology. Breaking with Intel's previous "tick–tock" manufacturing and design model, Kaby Lake represents the optimized step of the newer process–architecture–optimization model. Kaby Lake began shipping to manufacturers and OEMs in the second quarter of 2016, and mobile chips have started shipping while Kaby Lake (desktop) chips were officially launched in January 2017.
In August 2017, Intel announced Kaby Lake Refresh (Kaby Lake R) marketed as the 8th generation mobile CPUs, breaking the long cycle where architectures matched the corresponding generations of CPUs. Skylake was anticipated to be succeeded by the 10 nanometer Cannon Lake, but it was announced in July 2015 that Cannon Lake had been delayed until the second half of 2017. In the meantime, Intel released a fourth 14 nm generation on October 5, 2017, named Coffee Lake.
Kaby Lake is the first Intel platform to lack official driver support for versions of Windows older than Windows 10. Furthermore, Windows Update is disabled under Windows 8.1 and earlier, although an enthusiast-created modification was released that disabled the check and allowed it to continue to work on the platform. Due to "security concerns", Windows 11 is not officially supported on any of the 7th generation Kaby Lake processors (except Core i7-7820HQ and X series), although Microsoft has stated that it will test those processors for compatibility. However, it is still possible to install it on systems using the 7th generation processors, with users accepting that they are not entitled to receive any updates and any damages caused by using the operating system on an unsupported configuration are not covered by the manufacturer's warranty. This puts 7th generation Kaby Lake processors (except Core i7-7820HQ and X series) in an odd position where only one Windows version is officially supported, Windows 10, in contrast to older and newer generations which have official support for multiple versions of Windows.
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