The Intel Skylake processors are going to be unveiled on 5th August at Gamescom, which is just a few weeks away. We have come here to see several leaks on Skylake, regarding the variants, the SKUs, the platform and even seen some benchmarks already in which the Core i7-6700K is being compared to the Core i7-4790K. The Skylake generation of processors are going to boost the CPU and GPU performance further and incorporate new features which we are going to talk today.





Image Credits: FanlessTech

Intel Skylake Gets 10-20% CPU Performance Boost and Faster iGPU Compared to Broadwell

With Skylake, Intel is going nuts with the graphics performance as indicated in the slides posted by FanlessTech. The slides which are part of the final Skylake deck indicate several new things and some things which we know about already. Starting off with the comparisons that are made between Skylake and Broadwell. We know that Skylake and Broadwell are based on the new 14nm process from Intel. The difference is that Broadwell is a Tick (Smaller Process Technology) while Skylake is a Tock (New CPU/GPU Architecture on the same process). Now it is known that Intel is going to increase the time-frame of their tick-tock cycle from two years to three years due to delay in the manufacturing of smaller nodes (post 14nm) and we will see a third Tock in the form of the 7th generation Kaby Lake in 2017. Now Kaby Lake won't be a completely new architecture but will deliver key tech improvements in departments such as Power efficiency and GPU performance before Intel moves to the 10nm process node.

So back to the differences, compared to Broadwell which brought a 5.5% IPC increase over Haswell and built on a 14nm process, Skylake will deliver 10-20% better CPU performance in both single and multi-threaded loads in any given application. When comparing overall SKUs and not just the desktop parts, Skylake will do so with low power demand compared to Broadwell. On the graphics front, Intel is updating to a Gen 9 iGPU which is going to include graphics chips up to the GT4e on Skylake-H and eDRAM integrated Skylake-U series. Intel is saying to expect a 50% better 3D Gaming performance on Skylake parts (45W GT4e vs 5th gen 28W GT3 and 47W GT3e). The battery life on Skylake improves from 8.5 hours to 11.3 hours which is a 30% increase and several new I/O features are added on the devices such as eMMC 5.0, SDXC 3.0, PCIE Gen3, CSI2, USB OTG. In terms of media focused improvements, Intel has integrated a HEVC devode/encode engine that delivers faster and ultra HD quality media transcode. There are also updates to the voice, camera and touch/sense features that are listed in the slides. Overall, the main features include:

10 to 20 percent better CPU performance in single and multi-threaded applications

Intel Gen9 iGPUs Deliver up to 50% better 3D Gaming performance compared to Broadwell

Support for hardware-accelerated HEVC encoding

Integrated support for 4K cameras or up to 4 HD cameras

Up to 30 percent longer battery life (If a device got up to 8.5 hours of run time with a Broadwell chip, the same hardware should last for over 11 hours with a Skylake chip).

Now moving on to the slide the details the performance improvements (do note that this is preliminary data of performance for Skylake chips and not indicative of final performance numbers). The Skylake-S (Desktop chips) deliver up to 11% faster CPU performance with 22% lower TDP and 28% faster graphics performance compared to Broadwell. The Intel Skylake H-Series has 11% faster CPU performance with 80% lower silicon power (whole die) and 16% faster graphics performance with its GT4e graphics chip. The Intel Skylake U-Series has 10% faster CPU performance with up to 1.4 hours longer battery life and 34% faster graphics performance. The Skylake Y-Series has the bulk of the performance improvement with a 17% faster CPU, 41% faster graphics core and up to 1.4 hours longer battery life. Intel is trying to pave way for faster graphics that meet the performance levels of some discrete entry level cards and they did achieve this milestone with the Broadwell C and H series chips. It seems like the gap will be further closed with Skylake as entry level discrete GPUs will start facing some dirty competition with Intel's high-performance iGPUs that are going to be part of their entire processor lineup.

DDR4 3800 MHz (C18) Overclock Achieved With Skylake Core i7-6700K

The second news comes straight from Coolaler Forums who have achieved a 3.8 GHz overclock on DDR4 DIMMs with a Skylake Core i7-6700K processor. The result of this overclock can be seen in the bandwidth scores shown inside the AIDA64 cache and memory benchmark which are impressive.