Intel Demos Kaby Lake 7th Gen Core Series Running Overwatch At IDF (hothardware.com)

Reader MojoKid writes: Intel unveiled a number of new product innovations out at IDF last week, but the company also stuck to its core product march by teasing its next gen Core series processor. Kaby Lake is the follow-up product to current, 6th Generation Skylake-based Core processors. With Kaby Lake, Intel is adding native support for USB 3.1 Gen 2, along with a more powerful graphics architecture for improved 3D performance and 4K video processing. Kaby Lake will also bring with it native HDCP 2.2 support and hardware acceleration for HEVC Main10/10-bit and VP9 10-bit video decoding. To drive some of those points home, Intel showed off Overwatch running on a next-gen Dell XPS 13 built around a 7th Gen ULV Core i5 processor, in addition to a HP notebook smoothly playing back 4K HDR video. Kaby Lake 7th Generation Core-based products should start arriving to market in the fall.

Comments

Re:4K HDR video

[CajunArson]

HDR HEVC video on 4K is not trivial to process on a very low power CPU. That's where the hardware acceleration comes in as being important.

As a point of reference, my desktop 4770K that's overclocked to 4.7GHz can have problems with playback of 60 Hz 4K HEVC video when in software mode, and that's with a software decoder that's using all available cores too.

With mpv setup properly, my GTX-1080 can show the same videos perfectly smoothly with single-digit CPU usage and the GPU doesn't even really heat up that much either since only a relatively small part of the GPU actually does the video acceleration. The hardware accelerated paths for video decoding are quite important.