Intel to stop production of Kaby-Lake X Core i CPUs just 11 months after introducing them

Kaby Lake-X upstaged by Skylake-X and sound thrashed by AMD's Ryzen 5 and 7 processors

The Kaby Lake-X line of CPUs introduced by Intel just eleven months ago is to be discontinued.

The move was revealed in an Intel 'product change notification', which showed that Intel is planning to discontinue the Core i7-7740X and Core i5-7640X from 7 May, with a big shutdown happening in November and the last product discontinuation shipment slated for 31 May 2019.

Intel is killing-off the Kaby Lake-X line up due to poor sales, with the £300+ quad core i7-7740X comparing poorly against the similarly priced AMD Ryzen 7 1700 and 1700X. Retailers such as eBuyer have already resonded by slashing prices of the more expensive Core i7-7740X by one-quarter in a bid to shift stocks.

The Kaby Lake-X Core i5 and Core i7 chips were released last year with the intention of giving PC enthusiasts a more powerful take on the chipmaker's mid and high-end Core i CPUs.

While they offered plenty of overclocking headroom - something that Intel hadn't offered on most of its CPUs in the recent past - the performance of vanilla Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs was arguably good enough for people with all but the most demanding gaming and rendering demands.

In addition to competition from better-specced Ryzen CPUs, Intel also tripped itself up a little as the previous generation Skylake-X processors offered more cores, memory channel support and PCIe lanes than Kaby Lake-X.

At the same time, Intel has also released a new driver intended not only to boost the performance of its integrated GPUs, but has been timed to launch with the Windows 10 April Update that started rolling out 30 April.

Normally such driver updates come some weeks after a Windows update. But Intel appears to be ahead of the game, indicating that it has a renewed interest in GPU technology and performance.

Part of that can be seen with its tie-up with rival AMD to integrate Core i processors with Vega graphics on the same chip.