Nearly two years after its grand launch, Intel is officially pulling the plug on its Kaby Lake-G processors. The last batch of the CPU will ship out by the end of July 2020, and the semiconductor maker has already started preparing end-of-life plans for it.
Specifically, the SKUs that will be discontinued include the Core i5-8305G, Core i7-8706G, Core i7-8709G, Core i5-8305G, Core i7-8809G, Core i7-8705G, and the Core i7-8706G. For customers still interested in owning the CPU, Intel is advising them to make their final orders for the processor by 31 January 2020 the latest. The final shipments of these CPUs will then be made by 31 July 2020.
Intel first announced its cross-licensing deal with AMD to create its Kaby Lake-G CPU back November 2017. Unlike a typical Intel CPU with its integrated Iris GPU, the Kaby Lake-G CPU came with a more powerful Radeon RX Vega integrated graphics, courtesy of AMD. One unique feature to Kaby Lake-G CPUs was its Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) that enabled a high-speed connection between the CPU and the Vega Graphics’ High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2).
Kaby Lake-G then made its debut at CES 2018 the following year, and Dell’s XPS 15 2-in-1 was one of the first notebooks to house Intel and AMD’s new processor. At current, Intel’s Ice Lake CPUs come with new Iris Plus integrated graphics, which reportedly has better performance than the Kaby Lake G CPUs.
