One month before the launch of Coffee Lake, Intel retires their 6th generation processors. The two years old Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K are now discontinued. The retirement of the 6th generation chips doesn't really come as a surprise, since Intel never sold three generations of chips in parallel.



By the beginning of January, Intel replaces the Core i7-6700K with the Core i7-7700K and the Core i5-6600K with the Core i5-7600K. Both Kaby Lake CPUs offers higher frequencies and the turbo works in a more aggressive way. In the end the Kaby Lake chips are up to 10% faster compared to the Skylake counterparts. Since the Kaby Lake models have the same price as the Skylake ones, the end of Skylake was already predictable.

As usual, the CPUs will not disappear from the shelves and from dealers after this official statement. According to Intel, they can be ordered until March 2018 and customers will deliver them until September 2018. This applies to the Core i7-6700K, Core i5-6600K as well as the special models with more powerful iGPUs. During the upcoming months, Intel is planning to release a few mainstream six-cores CPUs, which will be a big step forward for Intel as well as the market itself.



Source: ComputerBase