The Intel Developer Forum is right around the corner, and the company is expected to give us a whole lot more information about its new Skylake processors (beyond, that is, the high-end desktop chips we’ve already tested). The people over at FanlessTech couldn’t wait, though—they’ve posted what appears to be more information about part of the Skylake lineup, specifically the U-series processors bound for thin-and-light Ultrabooks and mini PCs.

It’s possible that this isn’t a complete list and that details could change when we get official information from Intel. But based on these slides, it looks like Intel could be bringing some much-needed simplicity to the lineup.

Eight CPUs, two GPUs, two chipsets

These slides show a total of eight dual-core processors: two Core i7s, two Core i5s, a single Core i3, a single Pentium, and a pair of Celerons. All chips share the same 15W TDP, the same as Haswell and Broadwell, and like Haswell and Broadwell that number should include both the CPU/GPU die and the chipset die mounted on the same package.

One Core i7 and one Core i5 chip support the business-oriented vPro and Trusted Execution Technology features, and the others don’t. All Core i5 and Core i7 chips support Turbo Boost, while the others don’t. All Core processors and the Pentium support Hyperthreading, while the Celerons don’t. And the amount of L3 cache decreases as you move down the stack—4MB for the Core i7, 3MB for the Core i5 and i3, and 2MB for the Pentium and Celeron.

Finally, all of the Core CPUs use the same GPU, the Intel HD 520. The Pentium and Celerons use a slower Intel HD 510 (we don't know how much slower, yet). And while one of the Celerons and the Pentium use a “baseline” chipset, all of the rest of the chips (including the other Celeron) use a “premium” chipset with more features.

Compared to Haswell and Broadwell, this U-series lineup drops quite a few products. Past generations included a few Core i5 and i7 chips that had higher base CPU clock speeds and slower GPUs, while others (used almost exclusively by Apple, but also common in mini PCs like the NUC) had lower base CPU speeds and faster, beefier GPUs. Compare the Core i5-5200U to the i5-5250U to see what we're talking about.

The Skylake lineup on these slides isn't bifurcated in the same way. It's possible that Intel just wants to simplify its complicated product lineup. Few OEMs used the U-series processors with the faster GPUs, and those GPUs weren't all that much faster than the “slow” ones anyway (in both Haswell and Broadwell, the difference in benchmarks between fast and slow could be anywhere from 20 percent to zero percent). Maybe every Skylake Ultrabook with an Intel HD 520 GPU in it is getting the best graphics performance Intel can squeeze into a chip with a 15W TDP.

It's also possible that this is just a part of the new U-series lineup, and that the rest of it is either on a separate slide somewhere or releasing at a later date. It could be the case that Intel has come up with a new designation for the CPUs with better GPUs, one that we’ll find out about at IDF. What I’m saying is that I really like the idea of a simplified lineup, but I won’t be a bit surprised if we find out about some hypothetical Core i5-6250U with an Intel HD 600 GPU next week.

All we have by way of performance estimates at this point is yet another leaked slide from FanlessTech, one that promises “up to 10 percent faster” CPU performance and “up to 34 percent faster” graphics compared to the previous generation (Broadwell-U, one assumes). Hopefully Intel will give us more detailed information soon.

DDR4 and DDR3 support

Skylake is Intel’s first consumer-targeted architecture to use the new DDR4 memory standard, and while DDR4 is coming to the U-series chips it doesn’t look like it will be as fast as it is on the desktop.

All of the chips support LPDDR3 and DDR3L running at a maximum speed of 1866MHz—a handful of Broadwell chips supported this speed, but the majority were capped at 1600MHz, so for most of these processors this is an increase. DDR4 speed is likewise capped at 1866MHz, as opposed to 2133MHz on the desktop. Notice, too, that the Pentium and Celerons drop DDR4 support entirely, though their DDR3 support is the same.

Early in Skylake’s run, we’d expect more than a few laptop makers to stick with the cheaper DDR3 option rather than jumping to DDR4, especially since DDR4 doesn’t offer a speed boost for Skylake-U like it does on the desktop. When the price difference starts going the other way, DDR4 will become more common.

Premium chipset, premium features

The “baseline” chipset included with the Pentium and one of the Celerons looks like it supports a robust but basic array of ports and standards: it includes two SATA III ports, four USB 3.0 ports, and eight USB 2.0 ports, and support for any number of storage interfaces including common ones like SDXC 3.0 and eMMC 5.0. The basic chipset is limited to PCI Express 2.0 lanes, same as Haswell and Broadwell.

The “premium” chipsets use PCI Express 3.0 lanes, but it’s up to OEMs to decide how to use them (Intel calls this “Flexible I/O,” and it gives OEMs the freedom to prioritize whatever they want). You can have between zero and three SATA III ports, up to six USB 3.0 ports, and some of the fancy fast PCIe 3.0 SSDs we talked about when we discussed the desktop chipsets. But there are only 12 of these PCI Express lanes available, so OEMs need to pick and choose—they can enable some of these features but not all of them at once. The size of laptops and desktops with U-series processors in them tends to limit the number of ports you can fit anyway, so it shouldn’t be a problem for either OEMs or end users.

Iris GPUs coming soon

Finally, the slides confirm that Intel will continue to make U-series CPUs with a 28W TDP and faster Iris-branded integrated GPUs, though we know very little about any of them. There will be one Core i7 chip, two Core i5 chips, and one Core i3 chip, and they’re all coming in the first half of 2016. That’s the sum total of what we know.

These CPUs are also used almost exclusively by Apple—historically they’ve been included in the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro to give it a bit more firepower than the 15W CPUs would. Expect the same thing to happen in the Skylake generation.

The U-series CPUs were originally introduced as niche chips for thin-and-light systems, but in the space of just a few years they’ve become the company’s mainstream processors for consumer notebooks. Provided there aren’t more of these waiting in the wings, we’re glad to see that the lineup is getting simpler and that OEMs no longer have to choose between “fast” and “slow” integrated GPUs when putting systems together. Support for DDR4, faster DDR3, and PCIe 3.0 don’t hurt anything, either.

We’ll be on the ground at IDF next week, and we’ll bring you more information on the entire Skylake lineup (and more information on its CPU and GPU architecture) as we have it.