



One of the first ultralight Intel Skylake-based machines to hit our test bench was delivered by team

Intel's 6th Generation Skylake family of Core processors has been available for some time now. We previously gave you a look at the desktop variant that Intel initially rolled out. However, the mobile variant of Skylake is perhaps Intel's most potent incarnation of the new architecture that's power-optimized on 14nm technology and with a beefier graphics engine, for more capable thin and light notebooks. In late Q3, Intel started rolling out Skylake-U versions of the chip in a 15 Watt TDP flavor. This is the power envelope that most "ultrabooks" are built with and it's likely to be Intel's highest volume SKU of the processor series, which will ship in many OEM configurations this holiday shopping season.One of the first ultralight Intel Skylake-based machines to hit our test bench was delivered by team Lenovo . The company has refreshed and revamped their Yoga series notebook line-up with Skylake and the new Lenovo Yoga 900 is one of their more premium configurations with a 3K display, that just started shipping in the channel recently.





Lenovo Yoga 900 Specifications & Features Processor Up to 6th Gen. Intel Core i7 (i7-6500U and i5-6200U) Operating System Windows 10 Home Display QHD+ (3200x1800) IPS with 10-point Multitouch (300 NIT) Video Graphics Intel HD graphics Storage Up to 512GB SSD (256 and 512 GB) Memory Up to 16GB LP-DDR3 (8GB and 16GB) Audio Support JBL stereo speakers with Dolby Home Theater certification Camera 720p Integrated Communications Intel 802.11 A/C 2x2 System Weight 2.84 lbs. (1.29 kg.) System Dimension 324 x 225 x 14.9 mm / 12.75" x 8.86" x 0.59" inches Li-Ion Battery Life 66Whr (Up to 9 hours of local video playback*) Slots/Ports 2 x USB Type A 3.0, 1 x USB Type C 3.0 w/ video out, 1 x DC-in with USB 2.0 function, 4-in-1 card reader (SD, MMC, SDXC, SDHC), Audio Combo Jack Price: $1400, as configured and tested You might recall that Skylake's memory controller supports both DDR4 and DDR3 memory technology. As you'll note here, this machine is configured with 16GB of dual-channel LP-DDR3 1600 memory, which will likely be common for most Skylake ultrabooks that are first arriving to market.



Next, let's look at some quick Skylake-U and system vital signs...

Seeing as this was one of the first Skylake -U series machines we had in for testing, we decided to work up a quick performance profile of the new platform here, replete with benchmarks in a number of areas and a quick and dirty heavy load battery test. In terms of quick specs, here's what the new Yoga 900 is made of...You might recall that Skylake's memory controller supports both DDR4 and DDR3 memory technology. As you'll note here, this machine is configured with 16GB of dual-channel LP-DDR3 1600 memory, which will likely be common for most Skylake ultrabooks that are first arriving to market.Next, let's look at some quick Skylake-U and system vital signs...

The Lenovo Yoga 900 we tested was configured with an Intel Core i7-6500U dual-core processor that also supports Intel HyperThreading for 4 logical processing threads available to the system. Its base frequency is 2.5GHz, but the chip will Turbo Boost to 3GHz, and as you can see, down clocks way down to 500 - 600MHz when idle. The chip also has 4MB of shared L3 cache and 512K of L2 and 128K of data cache, total.



As an aside, with a DDR3-1600 memory configuration, this system also reports in 18.22GB/sec of memory bandwidth in SiSoft SANDRA's memory bandwidth test, which calculates total memory bandwidth inclusive of both system RAM and processor cache.



Our Test Vehicle - Lenovo's Yoga 900 - Upward-Facing Geek?