Chipzilla’s CEO is reporting that Intel is essentially finished with development and even production of their 14nm Kaby Lake line of processors.

Kaby Lake

Intel Kaby Lake almost ready for prime time, end of 2016

The processor will be architecturally based on the same 14nm process that Skylake is based on, though with slight improvements to the cores, cache and IGP. It won’t be a groundbreaking increase in performance over Skylake but will be more generational and a stop-gap until Cannonlake appears on it’s 10nm process. Those processors aren’t scheduled until 2017 now. Regardless of how much faster it actually is, it will at least be marginally more quick than Skylake. And now AMD is will have to catch up to the performance standard of the new Kaby Lake. They’ve already state that Zen is at least 40% faster than it’s predecessor and that it’s as fast as Skylake, but soon, if Kaby Lake systems ship before too long, that won’t be the standard to be measured by. The good news is that we should be seeing systems with the new processors by the end of the year.