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takyon writes:

Intel has announced that Kaby Lake mobile CPUs are coming in Q4 2016, with desktop CPUs coming in January:

As part of the release, Intel has mentioned that a number of key benefits for Kaby Lake will be based on an optimized 14nm process, called 14PLUS (or 14nm+, 14FF+). This process as a quick summary has a higher fin height and larger pitch, essentially giving a less-dense set of transistors that have more room to breathe. Normally a larger pitch means more voltage required, but this is offset by the fin height and Intel says is good for another few hundred MHz for performance. The less-dense design, in theory, may also help in overclocking, however we will have to wait until January to see those results.

[...] Intel hasn't gone into much detail regarding the new 14nm+ process itself in terms of specifics, but has listed a number of performance gains that come out of the new CPU. The fundamental microarchitecture between Skylake and the new Kaby Lake parts is practically unchanged (DMI 3.0 now allows PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drives from the integrated PCH), but the updated fin profile and reduced 'strain' by the larger fin pitch is being quoted as giving a 12% performance increase due to process alone, typically through additional frequency for the same power. The main benefits to KBL will be in that frequency due to the 14nm+ process as well as the new media capabilities.

There does not appear to be an improvement in instructions per clock between Skylake and Kaby Lake. Instead, clock speeds (particularly the turbo clock) are up by as much as a few hundred MHz. For example, the Skylake-based m7-6Y75 is being replaced by the i7-7Y75 with +100 MHz base clock and +500 MHz turbo clock. Similarly, the i7-6500U gives way to the i7-7500U with +200 MHz base and +400 MHz turbo. The change in the shape of the FinFET transistors has allowed greater power efficiency or higher clock speeds at the same power consumption. Kaby Lake also improves the "Speed Shift" feature that was introduced by Skylake, which can allow the CPU to ramp up to full performance more quickly (taking 10-15 ms instead of 30 ms for Skylake).

On the integrated GPU, Kaby Lake-U/Y introduces full hardware acceleration for encode and decode of 4K HEVC Main10 profile videos, as opposed to the "hybrid" CPU/GPU acceleration used by Skylake. Intel has also added full hardware decode support for VP9. The changes will allow 4K/2160p content to be decoded using a fraction of the CPU utilization and power consumption that Skylake required.

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