After barely a year on the market, Intel’s Kaby Lake-X processors are being discontinued.
Released with the X299 platform in mid 2017, Kaby Lake-X consisted of two four-core processors, the Core i5-7640X and the Core i7-7740X, that were the lowest-end parts compatible with the platform. Intel’s justification for producing Kaby Lake-X was that it served as an entry point to the company’s HEDT platform.
Because X299’s feature set depends so much on processor pairing, the reality was that Kaby Lake-X didn’t really unlock any benefits of the expensive motherboards it required. For example, when paired with a Kaby Lake-X processor, X299’s full potential of quad channel memory and 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes is cut to only two channels and 16 lanes.
It’s probably to no one’s surprise, then, that the market apparently didn’t agree with Intel that low performance mixed with high costs makes for great products. Kaby Lake-X was the subject of much ridicule from the start and was generally not well received by the enthusiast community due to its dubious market proposition. To that end, Intel has discontinued the parts in an official product change notification. The note shows that all retail versions of Core i5-7640X and the Core i7-7740X will be leaving the market within this year.
We don’t expect anyone will be missing Kaby Lake-X. X299 being so processor-dependent was a sore issue for enthusiasts from the beginning, but Kaby Lake-X only highlighted this fact. What’s more, AMD’s X370 platform, which launched only months before X299, already gave users ready and easy access to a high number of PCIe lanes and cheap processor options.
Ultimately, Kaby Lake-X just seemed like it was entirely out of touch with market demands. As we reported earlier this month, however, the X299 platform as a whole might be undergoing some changes soon. A successor chipset, the X399, was leaked in an Intel document.
