According to Digitimes Kaby Lake is scheduled to launch in the third quarter, but will not begin volume production until the end of 2016, while AMD is set to release its Zen chips at the end of the year too. This means that the two CPU’s will enter fierce competition by the end of the year and if AMD fails to win a significant bit of market share it could be toast.

Intel originally wanted its 10nm Cannon Lake succeed its 14nm Skylake architecture in mid-2016, but changed its mind and pushed the 14nm Kaby Lake as the successor, allowing its 10nm process more time to increase yield rates. Kaby Lake-series will begin with the U-series which will start small volume production in mid-June, with mass production to start in November or December. The corresponding chipsets including the Z270 and H270-series will be announced in October at the earliest.

AMD will release its AM4 socket-based eight-core high-end Summit Ridge and Raven Ridge-series processors both using Zen architecture and manufactured on Samsung Electronics' and Globalfoundries' 14nm processes in the first quarter of 2017.

But the dating of all this means that it will be a lot more of a head to head fight than expected.