Intel is discontinuing its Kaby Lake-X series

Less than a year after release, Intel is putting its High End Desktop (HEDT) Kaby Lake-X processors out to pasture by announcing its end of life plans to discontinue the products. Despite its timeline, this is no surprise considering the series failed to impress, with Kaby Lake-X delivering marginal performance increases over its commercial non-X variants and competitors within a similar price range.

Intel revealed the news in its latest support document, which lists the key milestones for the Kaby Lake-X processor, beginning with its May 7th discontinuation. Last orders for the products will be conducted on November 30th, leading into the last shipments sent out May 31st 2019.

Before being dwarfed by the introduction of the 6-core, 12-thread Core i7-8700K mere months after its release, the Kaby Lake-X line was already blasted for offering “slightly better overclocking capacity” over its Core i7-7700K commercial counterpart, despite Intel marketing the chip towards overclocking enthusiasts.

Kaby Lake-X failed due to its poor implementation on the HEDT platform, with the chips utilising half the standard DIMMs on standard HEDT motherboards with just two memory channels. HEDT platforms often forgo the use of integrated graphics, making the Kaby Lake-X seem even more like a castrated Kaby Lake i7-7700K.

The Core i5-7640X and Core i7-7740X remain available over on Amazon for those that might still be interested in the obsolete platform, but there are distinctly better chips within a similar price range.

KitGuru Says: It’s understandable that Intel would release its 8th generation six-core CPUs to better combat AMD’s Ryzen and Threadripper chipsets, however it did seemingly cost the Kaby Lake-X its life. Then again, with such negligible performance increases despite the jump in price, it could be questioned if it ever truly had a place in comparison to Skylake-X counterpart.

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