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.
AMD crafts custom EPYC CPU with HBM3 memory for Microsoft Azure – CPU with 88 Zen 4 cores and 450GB of HBM3 may be repurposed MI300C, four chips hit 7 TB/s
AMD-powered El Capitan is now the world's fastest supercomputer with 1.7 exaflops of performance — fastest Intel machine falls to third place on Top500 list
