Although they have only been around for just under three years, Intel is sending a handful of Kaby Lake-U Refresh CPUs off to early retirement. The chips in question are the 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250U, i5-8350U, i7-8550U and i7-8650U.
Intel introduced these chips in August 2017, and they were among the first chips from Intel to bring four CPU cores to mobile platforms. This means that although they were a refresh of the 7th Generation Kaby Lake CPUs, they did offer significant performance increases over their previous-generation counterparts.
Despite a doubling of the core count, however, the chips kept the same TDP as their predecessors of 15W.
| CPU | Cores/Threads | Base Clock | Turbo Frequency |
| Intel Core i5-8250U | 4 / 8 | 1.60 GHz | 3.40 GHz |
| Intel Core i5-8350U | 4 / 8 | 1.70 GHz | 3.60 GHz |
| Intel Core i7-8550U | 4 / 8 | 1.80 GHz | 4.00 GHz |
| Intel Core i7-8650U | 4 / 8 | 1.90 GHz | 4.20 GHz |
All the aforementioned CPUs went into their discontinuance program as of yesterday. The final order date for the i7-8650U and i5-8350U's is October 23, 2020 with and a final shipment date of April 9, 2021. The i7-8550U and i5-8250U will see end-of-life slightly sooner on July 24, 2020 with a final shipment date of January 22, 2021.
Meanwhile, only two Kaby Lake-U Refresh processors remain on the market: the Pentium Gold 4417U and Celeron 3867U. However, Intel introduced these chips in 2019, so they still have some time to go before getting the axe.
