On account of the fact that Intel's 5th-gen Core processors still haven't hit the desktop, it's quite something to realize that Skylake, the 6th-gen, is right around the corner.

Marco talked a bit about Broadwell's desktop counterpart early last month, and overall, it's worth looking forward to. Does that mean you'll want to upgrade from Haswell? Almost certainly not. While it's undoubtedly going to offer some nice benefits over Haswell, with good help from its shrink to 14nm, Skylake is really going to be the "big one".

For enthusiasts, it's going to be Skylake-S that will garner the most attention. WCCFtech reports on some of what's coming, including the fact that Skylake as a whole could launch later this summer, with a mobile variant finding its way into Microsoft's Surface Pro 4.

Like Broadwell, Skylake is going to be available in a wide-range of models, each catering to a different segment of the market. At the low-end, a 4W part is expected, while for most desktop users, 35~65W parts will be common. Then there's the Skylake-S, which will reach 95W with certain quad-core models.

According to the slide above, Skylake-S is going to have a new graphics microarchitecture, but it's not entirely clear at this point what it's going to be called. As Broadwell's top-end chips are rumored to have Iris Pro HD 6200, Skylake-S' GT4e IGP could be called HD 7000.

While Broadwell is going to be supported in most H97/Z97 motherboards (after an EFI update), Skylake is going to require yet another socket change, adding just a single pin to make LGA1151. While that's a downside, the Intel 100 series chipset that's en route will help make up for that pain, by providing 40% faster high-speed I/O, and DDR4 support.

Another major addition to Skylake worth noting is support for Thunderbolt 3.0, codenamed "Alpine Ridge", which will double the amount of bandwidth of 2.0, putting us at a staggering 40Gbps.

Once again, Skylake and Skylake-S are expected to land this fall, but we'll first have to get the Broadwell launch out of the way. While Intel could have easily skipped over the desktop Broadwell launch after its delays, I am glad to see it still prepped for launch, since it has been two years since the Haswell launch.