Up until now, the biggest difference between Intel’s budget Pentium chips and its Core i3 offerings has been the presence of Hyper-Threading. The line between Pentiums and Core i3s is blurring with the release of Kaby Lake Pentium chips, though. Eagle-eyed Hardware.info forum user J_C_W spotted the HT-enabled Pentiums in Intel’s ARK and tipped off his forum mates to the change. Here’s a list of the SMT-enabled Pentiums arriving with Kaby Lake:
Aside from the clock speed boosts common to many Kaby parts and the addition of Hyper-Threading, there’s little difference between these chips and their Skylake counterparts. In its endless march to segment its product lineup, however, Intel has decided to cut out ECC RAM support from these CPUs. That could annoy folks who relied on Pentiums to power home servers or NAS boxes.
