After just 11 months on the market, Intel is retiring its quad-core Kaby Lake-X high-end desktop (HEDT) processor family, the company revealed in a 'product change notification' (PDF) on its website. They'll remain on the market for a bit, but after some time, vendors will not longer be able to buy additional Kaby Lake-X parts from Intel.
That's not likely to pose a problem, for vendors or consumers, as Kaby Lake-X was always a somewhat confusing and uninteresting entry in Intel's HEDT category. It launched alongside Skylake-X for Intel's X299 platform, but was hard to justify buying unless you were looking for a cheaper upfront X299 solution with the intention of upgrading to Skylake-X down the line.
One of the reasons is because Kaby Lake-X only supports 16 PCIe-lanes, at least from the CPU; the chipset still provides an additional 28 PCIe lanes, though they share a DMI 3.0 connection to the CPU. In addition, Kaby Lake-X only supports dual-channel memory configurations, rendering half the memory slots on a X299 motherboard useless.
If all that weren't enough of a deterrent, the introduction of six-core Coffee Lake processors last October essentially shoved Kaby Lake-X aside, making an early retirement seem inevitable. And so here we are.
Retailers and OEMs can still order more Kaby Lake-X parts up through November 30, 2018. After that, Intel will not accept any additional orders. The last shipments are scheduled to go out May 31, 2019.
